Commentary

Good morning, Gov. Wes Moore. I hope you enjoy your Saturday at the Preakness Stakes. I don’t know much about a day at the races except that it is a good opportunity to dress up a bit, drink and eat with friends in an unusual setting and lose a little money trying to figure out exactly what an exacta is. Oh, and there are horses.

It is such a simple ceremony: Scoop up a bit of earth with a small shovel and place it in a glass jar. But the symbolism is deep. The soil was collected to remember three shameful crimes in Frederick County’s not-so-distant past — the lynching of three men by mobs in the tumultuous decades after the Civil War.

It was 50 years ago, on May 19, 1973, when Secretariat, one of the greatest racehorses of all time, won the Preakness on his way to the Triple Crown. Bill Nack, one of the greatest racing writers of all time, chronicled Big Red’s journey into thoroughbred legend. The horse lived 19 years; lame from a painful degenerative disease, he was euthanized on Oct. 4, 1989, at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. Nack, who wept that day for Secretariat, died in 2018 at age 77 at his home in Washington.

Amy Morgan is a family therapist who works primarily with couples going through a rough patch. I called her to talk about Daniel Snyder. I explained that after 24 years — after zero Super Bowl appearances, after congressional and NFL investigations, after earning the near-universal enmity of fans — Snyder finally did the right thing and said he would sell Washington’s NFL team. So why didn’t I feel any better about it?

Midshipman Gabe Neale, commander of this year’s Herndon Monument climb at the Naval Academy, poses in front of it before plebes began ascending it on May 17, 2023.  Midshipman Claire Pelletier-Heblock predicted the time that the 17th Company would need to scale the Herndon Monument on Wednesday morning, a bold statement. “Two hours,” she said.

On Feb. 3, the only sound echoing farther than the thundering crash of the derailment of a 1.7-mile-long Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials in East Palestine, Ohio was the subsequent outcry from politicians. Make no mistake, this was a disaster with explosions and fire (some of it deliberately set as a controlled burn to reduce the scale of the toxic spill). Despite the enormous turnout of emergency personnel and first-responders, elected officials from Ohio Gov.

Montgomery County faces a public education staffing crisis. A staff and faculty shortage combined with record-setting enrollment has more than overburdened our support staff, faculty, administrators, and nurses. Shortchanging education spending is only exasperating the situation, particularly as Montgomery County is now spending less on education per student than it did over a decade ago.