Commentary

Smallpox has been eradicated from the face of the Earth following a highly effective, worldwide vaccination campaign. Paralytic poliomyelitis is no longer a problem in the U.S. because of development and use of effective vaccines against the poliovirus. In current times, millions of lives have been saved because of rapid deployment of effective vaccines against COVID-19. And yet, it has been 37 years since HIV was discovered as the cause of AIDS, and there is no vaccine.

Other than my mom, who left this Earth a decade ago, the deceased person I’ve probably missed the most over the past five years has been Wayne Barrett, my mentor and role model in the journalism business, who died on Jan. 19, 2017 at the age of 71. That’s a significant date that we’ll get back to shortly. When I think about the madness of the last five years, I think maybe Wayne would have made sense of it all.

In March, President Biden unveiled the American Jobs Plan, an historic investment in the United States’ long-neglected infrastructure systems. The plan, which is undergirded by the idea that infrastructure improvements must also attack environmental injustice and the growing climate crisis, is a revolutionary signal to states and cities across the country that it’s time to invest in zero-emission clean energy, transportation and buildings.

The recent guest commentary by Maryland Advocates for Sustainable Transportation unfairly attacks Comptroller Peter Franchot and continues to propagate a series of misrepresentations about Maryland’s proposed public-private partnership to add new managed lanes to the American Legion Bridge and I-270. As we have learned in the recent past, just repeating fake news does not make it real. The commentary continues to cite the costs and impacts of implementing toll lanes on sections of I-495 east of the I-270 spur that are not even part of Phase 1 of the P3 program.

Forget the momentary shortage of gas. There’s an abundance of toilet paper. Most people are not hoarders. But those are the two commodities that seem to bring out the selfishness and impatience in people, though the correlation between the combustion engine and America’s bowel habits is difficult to discern. At the peak of the pandemic, toilet paper and disinfectant wipes were premium goods, nearly at cryptocurrency value.

A Gubernatorial “pardon” is a poorly named mechanism to redress the terror deaths of Black lynching victims, conjuring as it does the idea of absolution in cases where guilt — which generally was never or poorly established in the first place — was beside the point. The indisputable crimes, and the irrefutable guilt, belong not to the victims of the lynchings but to their perpetrators, the mobs that killed with the active assistance or complicity of local officials and law enforcement.