Commentary

In the South and Southwest, and most intensely from Southern California to South Florida, a dangerous heat wave has gripped the nation, with 104 million Americans under a heat warning advisory. Records are being broken right and left: The first full week of July was recorded as the Earth’s hottest on record, and it followed the hottest June on record.

Maryland was about to settle into a nice, quiet Fourth of July weekend. And while among the chattering classes there was some anticipation for the candidate filing deadline to come on July 6, Maryland political leaders were settling in for a quiet weekend as well. This was in 1998. What followed was anything but quiet or orderly. And it’s easy to see that the chaotic events of that oft-forgotten weekend and the days that followed are still reverberating in Maryland politics today.

I felt terrified entering the McDonald’s. An armed guard in full military gear stood at the door, holding an Uzi — a fully automatic machine gun. It was 2004, in Tel Aviv, Israel. The second intifada, or uprising, was ongoing and there had been a recent bombing at a restaurant popular with Americans. The guard was hired to make patrons feel safer, but his presence had the opposite effect. It felt like a war zone. Empty tables told me I was not alone in this feeling. I just left.

Every Sunday morning, Dennis Slaughter’s cousin sets him up to sell copies of The Baltimore Sun on a concrete median near a traffic light in Southwest Baltimore. Neither Slaughter nor his cousin, an independent contractor, work for the newspaper; the choice of sales location is theirs. In Slaughter’s case, it’s the four-foot-wide median on the stretch of U.S. 40 known as Edmondson Avenue.

Development is essential to the health and longevity of a community. Typically, it brings more diverse goods and services, new employment and educational opportunities and higher property values in the long-term. But rapid, unchecked and ill-planned development creates overcrowding and danger — and it drives out the very residents that make up the heart and soul of the community.

Actor Nicole Ari Parker and I grew up in Baltimore around the same time, but we never met. Because it’s Smalltimore, though, I knew people who were like, “Didn’t you go that party at the thing where she was that time?” or “Girl, I used to take dance lessons with her.” We didn’t run in the same circles — Parker went to Roland Park Country School, I was a public school kid — but I can now say she is, sort of, part of a group of old friends.

Frederick County Councilman Mason Carter, a freshman Republican, has identified a significant problem with the county program that offers tax credits to businesses that create new jobs. Only two businesses are taking advantage of the program. That is a problem because the program was created to strengthen economic development.

What mixture of despair, desperation and thwarted pride would make one or more shooters fire wildly at dozens of innocent people — kids mostly — enjoying a holiday block party? How does an annual summer celebration go from pony rides and face painting to a mass shooting? In a chronically violent city, last week’s bloodshed in South Baltimore was unusually disturbing.