Commentary

It’s right there near the top of the Declaration of Independence. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are the unalienable rights bestowed on us by our creator. As we approach Independence Day, let’s not think too hard on whether Thomas Jefferson should have written “inalienable” instead of “unalienable.” Instead, what the heck did America’s most famously flawed founder mean by the pursuit of happiness?

A number of people have asked me some version of: “Why would you leave a lovely family and a perfectly comfortable home to traverse the East Coast by foot for half a year, climbing every mountain along the way?” To answer that question, I need to share a piece of personal lore that might at first seem unrelated, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it.

“The Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared in her dissent from Monday’s Trump v. United States ruling. The decision virtually guarantees that special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case against the former president won’t move to trial before the election.

As disinformation and misinformation become major tools of global conflict, democracies need to decide when and how they should influence populations abroad. Influence campaigns are undoubtedly necessary, but how to conduct them according to democratic values is less obvious. The Pentagon has offered a good lesson in what not to do. A clandestine disinformation campaign against Chinese coronavirus vaccines in 2020 and 2021, a program just revealed in an investigation by Reuters, was a grave error.

For anyone living in Baltimore, it is all too easy to recognize the devastating impact of gun violence, particularly on young Black men from less affluent neighborhoods. We have grown accustomed to the yearly, monthly and even weekly body counts. While the number of homicides and non-fatal shootings has thankfully declined recently — falling to the lowest level in a decade last year — it is staggering to comprehend the broader and lingering impact of guns on our community.

Nobody asked me, but, with graffiti out of control in parts of Baltimore, why not round up the vandals, exchange their spray paint for paint brushes and put them to work on murals? It could be a collaborative effort led by the mayor’s staff, similar to the effective approach taken with squeegee guys. Maybe graffitists could be convinced that their contributions to murals — new ones, such as Saba Hamidi’s amazing “corridor of color” along the Maryland Avenue overpass of the Jones Falls Expressway, and touch-ups of old ones — would be more lasting than graffiti and certainly more appreciated.

I’m not a spiritual person. There is no heaven above, no hell below. We make our own right here, right now. I’ve come to think of life on Albert Einstein’s terms, or at least those he expressed in his theory of energy conservation. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It forever changes from one form to another and another.