Commentary

We write in response to “New Commission Will Study Md. State Parks As Visits Soared During Pandemic” [Maryland Matters, Aug. 7]. As Maryland residents and co-chairs of the Partners for Open Space, we applaud Senate President Bill Ferguson and House Speaker Adrienne Jones for their leadership to establish a State Park Investment Commission, which will help to highlight and address equity, maintenance and capacity issues at Maryland state parks.

When President Barack Obama wore a tan suit in the summer of 2014, he was scowled at for days as the greatest wardrobe malfunction since Janet Jackson’s support system collapsed before millions of viewers during Super Bowl halftime a decade earlier. The taupe trope was the most scandalous event of Obama’s eight years in office.

“Don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchi!” Rep. Lauren Boebert yelled at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “You leave us the hell alone!” Ms. Boebert, a Colorado Republican, has described her election to Congress as “a sign and a wonder, just like God promised.” She’s a moderate in some circles. One Florida pastor hears parishioners call the vaccination the “sign of the beast,” a biblical reference to the apocalypse. A Tennessee pastor who threatens to expel anyone who wears a mask to his church also discourages people from getting the vaccination, which he falsely claims contains aborted fetal tissue.

Children can’t learn and grow on an empty stomach. We see how hunger impacts our communities, especially families with children. Prior to COVID-19, hundreds of thousands of children in Maryland lived in homes that struggled to put food on the table. Since the onset of the pandemic, an alarming spike in food insecurity among children has been reported. Children who experience food insecurity face dire consequences in their overall health, well-being and development. Hunger has no place in Maryland. Now more than ever, children in Maryland need free Healthy School Meals for All.

In a recent announcement that should not be overlooked, the U.S. Department of Education recently laid the foundation for a monumental, generation-defining shift that will help people in prison successfully re-enter society. On July 30, the department announced it will expand the Second Chance Pell experiment for the 2022-23 award year. Launched in 2015, the Second Chance Pell experiment provides Pell Grants to incarcerated men and women for enrollment in post-secondary education programs provided in state and federal prisons.

The first mandatory vaccination case to reach the Supreme Court comes from Indiana University, which is requiring students to get COVID shots before enrolling for the fall semester unless they have a medical or religious exemption. The lower courts have upheld the requirement under the authority of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 case in which the court upheld a smallpox vaccine requirement in my hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since the May 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, much of the attention on police reform has been directed at municipal police departments. But there has also been a noticeable uptick in protests against the practices of campus police. Protests have occurred at, among other schools, Yale University, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Minnesota and various campuses of the University of California system.

We’re a little over six months away from the filing deadline for the 2022 elections here in Maryland. Men and women from around the state will be running for offices up and down the ballot at the federal, state, and local level. You can be one of those people too. One of the biggest complaints I hear from people about politicians and elected officials is that politicians and elected officials “aren’t like me.”