Commentary

If you tell me a guy had a serious drug problem and needed thousands of dollars to pay a dealer who put a gun to his head, I could understand why the guy would run a financial scam and risk going to prison. If a woman had a serious gambling problem and needed a pile of cash to pay off a loan shark, I could understand why she stole money from her employer. But a scam to buy a 31-foot boat?

Over the last year, a record 80,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses. It is a real problem that has grown astronomically worse in Baltimore and Maryland due to the rise in synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which accounts for the vast majority of drug-related deaths. To fight this epidemic of addiction and misery, it will take resources for public health agencies, addiction services, law enforcement and the courts.

Identifying and nurturing the gifted and talented child is one of the most difficult jobs in education today — and one of the most controversial, as well. Who is gifted? In what way? Why are fewer children of color or underprivileged children chosen to receive the additional benefits of accelerated or broadened educational programs?

“The doors of the church are open.” That’s how the Rev. Grady A. Yeargin Jr. ended almost every one of the hundreds of sermons I heard him preach at the City Temple of Baltimore (Baptist), the Bolton Hill church I attended for half my life. Technically, that meant Sunday’s lessons were now ready to be carried from inside the walls of the building into the world. But if you knew “Rev,” as the kids who grew up at City Temple called him, you knew that openness started with him.

The billboard shows what looks like a young woman’s hands tied with rope. The words written over the image state “It happens here.” I saw the billboard across the street from a motel in Wicomico County, Maryland, where I met 40-plus migrant seasonal farmworkers from Mexico on H2A visas working on farms in Maryland. The horror of human trafficking, farmworkers tell me, can be true. It is not just about sex trafficking.

For nearly 2 1/2 hours Monday night, on the fourth floor auditorium at the National Federation of the Blind headquarters in South Baltimore, representatives of MCB Real Estate — including managing partner P. David Bramble — pitched their plan to tear down the Harborplace pavilions and replace them with four new, much taller buildings. Whether they changed a lot of minds in the crowd of about 200 people isn’t clear; more than a few seemed skeptical, particularly of the size and scale of the project, with its estimated $400 million in public investment required.