Commentary

University of Maryland student Shreya Vuttaluru could have picked any topic to spend months investigating. She chose one that saw her pushing automatic door buttons across campus and considering what also comes to a halt when elevators stop working. Last week, Vuttaluru and a group of students who work for the Diamondback, U-Md.’s independent student newspaper, published a project under the headline, “Disability on Campus.” For it, they scrutinized multiple aspects of accessibility on the College Park campus and interviewed students, workers and faculty members with a wide range of disabilities.

I was born in July 1956 in Silver Spring, Maryland. When I was 6, my parents told me that I was adopted. There was a storybook about adoption gently explaining what it meant. I remember thinking, “but you’re my parents.” My parents also said “don’t tell anyone.” They feared I would be stigmatized. Times were different then. It felt weird when people would say things like, “you look just like your mother.” Aside from being white, I didn’t look anything like either of my parents.

White Americans who worry about being replaced by immigrants and other people of color need to get a grip on reality. The “great replacement theory,” along with general immigrant anxiety, not only perpetuates racist paranoia but works against our nation’s economic health. If you don’t care about the former — the paranoia that leads to hate crimes like Saturday’s massacre in Buffalo — then maybe you care about the latter: How hysteria about immigrants hurts the economy and likely contributes to inflation.

Area schools are reluctant to put mask mandates and other COVID mitigation measures back in place, despite rising COVID rates and abundant evidence that masking reduces the spread of COVID. According to news accounts, and personal communication I have had with Baltimore County officials, one of the main reasons for this reluctance is “pushback” from those opposed to a mask mandate, like the protests in August, before school opened, in Baltimore County and in neighboring counties. And no doubt, there have been many other complaints.

Nearly three years after the Fort Meade Museum closed, a contractor team moved three tanks from the vacated building April 18 and 19, so they could be transported to new homes and once again serve as educational tools. The Liberty Mark VIII and M-3A1 light tank will become part of the U.S. Army Armor & Calvary collection at Fort Benning, Georgia, and the FT17/M-1917 hybrid light tank will be on display at the 1st Cavalry Museum at Fort Hood, Texas.

As an attorney, military spouse, and mom of three, balancing my career with motherhood and the demands of my husband’s active-duty service has always been a challenge. I remember well the birth of my second child and being relieved that my husband — who was gone for most of my pregnancy — was able to be home for the birth, although he had to leave just a few short days after I returned home from the hospital.

On Saturday, at the very hour that the people of Chestertown, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, gathered to remember the Black man lynched there by a white mob in 1892, police say a white teenager fueled by racist hatred started shooting people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. He is accused of shooting 13 people in all, 11 of them Black. Ten of his victims died.

Although the county over the past 15 years has increased the health department budget for mental health services for returning veterans and others, mental health budgets have generally been slashed at all levels of government — federal, state and local — and some state governors have ill-advisedly refused to expand Medicaid coverage that could have boosted investments in mental health services. While serving as county executive, I organized two public forums at Anne Arundel Community College to address the need to improve access to behavioral health resources, and we began to outline a strategy focusing on prevention, early intervention and treatment.