All in All

A few more thoughts about yesterday.

Some friends reached out to me to recount positive things happening around town: the Wilde Lake Family Picnic, the Monarchs and More Children’s event at the Chrysalis. A look around Twitter also showed businesses coming back on Ellicott City’s Main Street: Miss Fit and the Forget-Me-Not Factory. All in all, more of our community is thriving than not. We’re not completely a lost cause.

It’s interesting to note that, while the County Seat is Ellicott City, the protest event about Howard County Schools redistricting was held in Downtown Columbia. It’s an acknowledgement that the upstart community, around only since the late sixties, has become the center of the County. Yet somehow the entire point of Columbia - - better communities through racial, ethnic, and economic integration - - seems to have been lost on the protestors.

I saw so many posts on social media yesterday about the Wilde Lake High School band that I began to imagine what might happen if the musicians (from a school that many of the opposition have smeared) intersected with the protestors. Nothing would have made me happier than a serendipitous confrontation between the anti-redistricting crowd and the Wilde Lake High School Band in which the band prevailed gloriously and the protestors dispersed in confusion.

Didn’t happen. But in my imagination it was excellent.

One more thing. It would be wise to keep an eye out for folks who appear to be using all this community controversy in an effort to raise their own personal visibility. Yes, sadly, there will always be those who just hope to profit from the exposure. If the walk had not existed it might have been necessary for them to invent it. For the photo ops.

I don’t think those photos are going to hold up well over time.