Commentary

In recent pieces, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, writing for Salon, and Claire Cain Miller, writing for The New York Times, did an excellent job researching the global child care and education picture compared to what we provide here in the United States. Benjamin and Davies provided the data demonstrating that, “In the developed world, the United States is an outlier in its low levels of financial support for young children’s care. The U.S. spends 0.2 percent of its gross domestic product” – the total value of all goods and services produced in the country – “on child care for children 2 years old and under, which amounts to about $200 a year for most families.”

The vaccination numbers out of Montgomery County are so incredible, they sound as if they’re election results from an authoritarian regime. But according to the county itself, they’re real, with 99.9 percent of eligible Montgomery County residents having received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and 90 percent considered “fully vaccinated” with two doses. Our hospitalization numbers reflect this near-universal vaccination, with only 22 new coronavirus-related admissions in the past seven days (as of Oct. 18), a 42 percent decrease from the prior week, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It quite literally does not get much better than Montgomery County when it comes to coronavirus vaccines and hospitalizations.

Nobody asked me, but those attention-seeking politicians who want Maryland’s three westernmost counties to leave the state and become part of West Virginia strike me as ungrateful. One of the first things Larry Hogan did after 884,400 voters across the state made him governor was kill Baltimore’s Red Line and send $61.5 million to Garrett County for roundabouts and road extensions of dubious necessity at the Grantsville exit of Interstate 68. The project turned out to be so much fun to drive, it’s practically a tourist attraction.

The battle against COVID-19 can sometimes seem endless, being fought on so many fronts at the same time. The news is sometimes hopeful and sometimes disappointing, but the fight must go on. We have more than 725,000 reasons — the death toll so far — to keep going. Here in Frederick, our leaders are looking for the next best steps to take. Sometimes that means taking one step forward, one step back, then trying a new direction.

When I was young, everything in society seemed to aim one toward marriage. You would — and should — meet someone, get married and start a family. But even then, the share of people who were married was already falling. The year I was born, 1970, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 50 who had never married was just 9%. By the time I became an adult, that number was approaching 20%.

It was bad enough that Robert Jackson lost his job when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But without a reliable internet connection at home, the Maryland father struggled to look for work while caring for his son, Raquan. “The only way I could apply to jobs and get Raquan online for school was to use the hotspot on my phone,” he told interviewers last fall. “Or, I would have to drive Raquan somewhere else with Wi-Fi, like the school parking lot, and we would work out of the car.”

I love the moment when you come upon someone else’s joy, and all the better when you least expect it. There’s a nice sensation in discovering strangers blissfully at work or play. You step across the threshold into a certain well-lit room and suddenly everyone and everything seems charged and cheerful. So it happened when we opened the door to Arndrea Hoyle’s sewing class at Living Classroom’s UA House on East Fayette Street. There were six women smiling through their pandemic masks, enthralled in learning to sew and enthusiastic about their projects.

Real life for animals, it turns out, isn’t like a pixelated Disney film. For nearly two months, the D.C. area has been captivated by the tale of three zebras that escaped in late August from a farm in Prince George’s County, Md., a suburban area of sprawling subdivisions that could hardly be more removed from the African plains that are the species’ natural habitat. Their improbable saga — initially, it was reported there were five equine fugitives — offered what seemed to be a refreshing and much-needed diversion from the grim political news that so often dominates daily discourse here in the nation’s capital and its environs.