Commentary

Jim Thompson and William Harbold discovered silver in a place in the Patapsco River where it had not been seen in more than a century. The discovery occurred last Friday around 10 a.m. about 3 miles downstream of Ellicott City and just upstream of where the Bloede Dam used to be. As discoveries go, it was hardly sensational; it did not send shock waves through the stock exchange.

Last summer, the citizens of Maryland learned from The Baltimore Sun’s reporting that the former executive director of the Maryland Environmental Service (MES) spent lavishly in his tenure and ultimately negotiated a significant payout when he left to become the governor’s chief of staff that summer. This at a “not-for-profit business unit of the state of Maryland,” according to the MES website. The spending raised many questions about the organization’s oversight and whether officials were abusing its resources for personal gain rather than in alignment with the organization’s public mission to “provide operational and technical services to protect and enhance the environment for the benefit of the people of Maryland.”

As the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who is accused of killing George Floyd by mercilessly pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck, begins this week, I am convinced that Black people need healing as much as we need justice. There is a persistent heartache that comes with the knowledge that some of those who are sworn to protect Americans believe that doing so involves killing citizens who look like me. That pain is coupled with anger each time I see a still from the video of George Floyd’s death—a still in which Chauvin stares defiantly into a camera as Floyd dies beneath his knee.

Juneteenth is the celebration of Black American emancipation that started in Texas, marking the date in 1865 that enslaved people there were told they had been freed two years earlier. A group of Maryland lawmakers wants to make this a state holiday, giving state employees a paid day off and closing state offices, courts and other official functions. If it is approved, it is likely that local governments will follow and pressure will build for local schools still holding classes that late in the spring to join the shift.

With little time remaining in the Maryland General Assembly session, it’s useful — and discouraging — to look back at the working families policy agenda that nearly 50 organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of Marylanders, proposed at the beginning of the pandemic to help essential workers and those most affected by the shutdown. At the time, we called for a special legislative session to address Marylanders’ urgent needs related to housing, worker protections, health care and much more. Nearly one year later, our elected leaders have made some progress, but too many of these needs remain unmet and too many Marylanders are still struggling.

In the South of France, the cold, northwesterly wind that blows seasonally into the Gulf of Lion is called the Mistral. On the other side of the globe, Aussies know the summer wind that brings hot air from the outback to the coast is called the Brickfielder. And way out in the Northwest, the annual Chinook carries warmed air down the Rocky Mountains into the cool Pacific valleys. But on the Chesapeake Bay, winds of the sort that roared through over the weekend are just called wind, which is a shame. Surely there must be a name for this kind of remarkable phenomenon.