Look

It’s Sunday. Let’s go to church.

Pearly Young, 77, was killed today in #Buffalo shopping for groceries. 

For 25 years she ran a pantry where every Saturday she fed people in Central Park. Every. Saturday. 

She loved singing, dancing, & being with family. 

She was mother, grandma, & missionary. Gone too soon.

This memorial comes from a tweet by Madison Carter, a journalist who is originally from Buffalo but now works in Atlanta. She was headed back to Buffalo to assist with local coverage of the horrific event that unfolded yesterday at a Buffalo grocery store. 

Buffalo's worst mass shooting takes 10 lives, leaves 3 wounded; attack called 'a racially motivated hate crime' , Lou Michel, Ben Tsujimoto, Maki Becker for The Buffalo News

Of the 13 people shot, 11 were Black and two were white, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said. Most of the victims' identities weren't released as of late Saturday night. However, sources told The News that one of the dead was Aaron Salter, a recently retired Buffalo police officer working as a security guard at the store, while another is Ruth Whitfield, the mother of former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield.

The shooter was allegedly radicalized by online materials easily available to anyone. It appears it wasn’t all that difficult to assemble military gear and weapons, either. With white supremacist hate speech churning through his head, he drove to a shopping area in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Officials say a gunman’s attack that killed ten was a racially motivated hate crime Emma Bowman, Bobby Allyn for NPR

A racist screed posted online detailed the plan of attack.

The 180-page document is full of racist rants and appears to embrace "the great replacement" white supremacist conspiracy theory that claims that an elite cabal of Jews, corporate leaders and politicians are intentionally diluting the white population through permissive immigration and by promoting diversity.

What’s that? I said we were going to church?

Indeed. Yesterday’s news is the gospel of American white supremacy and unfettered gun access. And here comes the sermon.

All of this matters in Howard County, Maryland. I see white people on social media claiming such events have nothing to do with us here. But the same ingredients that poisoned and activated yesterday’s shooter are just as available here.

Students give testimony documenting racism in our schools.

You ignore it.

Advocates present factual evidence that school policing disproportionately harms Black and Brown students.

You deny it.

Members of the Howard County community speak out and work for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

You call it “race-baiting.”

When you refuse to face the truth of systemic racism in our community, you are providing cover for it. “It isn’t really happening,” is really, “Don’t look over there.”

Don’t read the books. Don’t have the conversations. Don’t listen to people who are different than you are. Don’t respect teachers and advocates and community leaders who make the case for facing the truth.

Deny them. Censure them. Silence them.

But in the dark corners of the internet and in this community the hate keeps drip, drip, dripping like poison , while you say, “Don't look.”

Open your eyes, my brothers and sisters. 

Look. 

Sweets for the Sweet

 

Who doesn’t love donuts? 

Are you a Thrift Store volunteer?

Tomorrow. May 12th, we will have a donut social and organize clothing at our Howard County Thrift Store from 9am to 12pm! 

See you then! 

I’m not particularly a fan of the Salvation Army. I don’t toss coins into their red kettles anymore. But I have to hand it to them for creating the best Twitter thread with donuts that I have ever seen. 

The idea is simple. Invite volunteers to work. Tempt them with donuts. Take photographs for National Salvation Army Week. Easy, right? I mean, who doesn’t love donuts?

Especially Krispy Kreme donuts.

What followed was the most exquisite array of donut appreciation you can possibly imagine.

Photo credit Salvation Army Howard County 

Honestly, not everyone looks this good in staged photos. These people are obviously multi-talented. They will come and organize donated clothes and make your publicity photos sing with enthusiasm.

Just bring donuts.

No, that doesn’t sound right. I think these people would be good sports even without the donuts. Still, I think they should get paid extra for modeling.

Oh, right, they’re volunteers. 

Do you shop at the Howard County Salvation Army store? Do you know any of these people? If so, tell them I think they’re brilliant.

Maybe Krispy Kreme should hire them.

The Small Delights of Home

 

Oh, thank goodness it’s Friday. I can let my mind wander a little.

This post from NPR caught my eye this morning. It’s an episode of their Life Kit series, entitled: 

“How paying attention can help you appreciate what's right in front of you”

Accompanying the twenty minute audio piece is a comic inspired by the piece. I haven’t had time to listen the all of the audio yet, but the comic definitely drew me in. The episode begins:

You know when you go on vacation and you notice every little detail about the place you're visiting? The statues! The billboards! The flowers bursting through the cracks in the sidewalk!

Humans pretty much do the opposite of that when they're in a familiar setting, going on autopilot and failing to notice the small delights of home. It doesn't have to be that way. 

The concept that our lives are so bombarded by distractions that it is difficult to be fully present in one’s immediate surroundings isn’t a new one. But, as our lives become ever more distracted, it’s a message that bears returning to over and over again. During the lockdown part of the pandemic many of us experienced waves of mindfulness in the solitude, whether in nature walks or the sensory connection of baking bread.

It doesn’t take long for that to slip away. 

Artist and writer Jenny Odell, interviewed for this episode, is the author of  How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The comic, written and illustrated by Connie Hanzhang Jin, adds a visual element to Odell’s suggestions on ways to detach from the daily grind and be more present in the here and now.

As I scanned the comic’s images something leapt out.

Paying consistent attention to one thing can reveal more info over time. Like this statue by Sarah Doherty that I pass almost every day where I live in Baltimore.

Wait, what? There’s a moai statue in Baltimore? Apparently there is. Here’s a piece from the blog Charm City Street Art: Weekly Images: 11.12.12

Photo by Caitlin Rose

Artist Sarah Doherty is a professor at MICA. I found a subsequent photo taken in 2016 that shows a huge amount of change from the original.

Photo by Kathy B.

I wonder if the artist has returned to replace the stucco that had worn away over time. I also wonder what the process of change would have looked like, day after day, for regular passers-by. There’s quite a bit of difference between the two photos. 

Who noticed? Who was there but never saw?

Back when I traveled from school to school one of my favorite sights was a enormous rabbit statue near Dayton Oaks Elementary. It was standing upright, a quite unexpected part of the suburban landscape. Not only whimsical by its very existence, the rabbit (was it cement?  or stucco like the Baltimore moai?) was regularly decorated for major holidays such as Christmas and Easter. I definitely watched that rabbit over time, through seasons changing, through holiday decorations, rainy days and sunny ones. 

Gosh I loved that rabbit. I truly regret that I never stopped the car and got a good photograph. It’s gone now. First cracks appeared and then chunks began to fall off and then it just simply went to pieces.

Your simple walk around your neighborhood is complicated in a lot of ways. Some of them may induce wonder. Some of them may induce despair. But I think I would rather be attentive to all of these things than to just kind of move through the world.

Give yourself some free-form time and space today, and over the weekend, to connect with what’s all around you.

It Ain’t Over

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Things are not going so well in the COVID department. Cases are going up, up, up. The increased spread within local schools even made the paper.

Worthington Elementary School in Ellicott City reports outbreak of 27 COVID-19 cases, Allana Haynes, Baltimore Sun

The County Executive keeps doing his part by informing the public of best practices and current cases reported.

In the meantime we have removed expectations and/or requirements that were helping to prevent the spread: masking and physical distancing, for example. As the removal of those protections leads to an increase in cases, schools no longer have access to backup support from central office because it has been assumed that the crisis part of the pandemic is over. 

It isn’t. 

COVID, on the other hand, is doing quite well, supported by those in the general public who would rather aid and abet an illness than modify their own behavior in order to care for others. You know who I mean. They are the ones who respond to public health posts like this:

They might as well have special frames around their Facebook profile pics:

“Working together to spread COVID”

“Masks? You can’t make me!”

“Vaccines are poison!”

“It’s only a cold.”

“It’s my right to get back to normal!”

Does it make any sense that some people would rather root for a disease that can cause long term damage or even death instead of committing to keep themselves and their neighbors safe? 

No, it doesn’t.

And have we forgotten that children under five still can’t be vaccinated?

Last week, on May 4th, the death toll from COVID in the US reached one million. You would think that number was big enough to inspire some reflection even in affluent Columbia/HoCo. But no one wants to talk about COVID anymore. I wonder if its ongoing presence will even rate an acknowledgement in upcoming political races. Are BOE candidates addressing it? 

“We’re done with that now,” I can hear people saying. 

Wishing won’t make it so. As much as we cover our eyes or our ears to shut out the truth, it’s still there. COVID isn’t done with us.

Are we going to do anything about that?

 

The Warehouse of Discovery

 

You can learn something on Twitter every day, if you know where to look. This morning I learned that Columbia has a warehouse district. Surprise! And you thought we just had a Merriweather District.

Bootleggers and Baptists: This Saturday 1-4PM we are back at The Warehouse District in front of @hysteriabrewery / @lostarkdistilling in Columbia, MD!  We are bringing the boys of @theoldeastern with us!

What I was envisioning when I read this was a geographic area with a newly-branded designation. I couldn’t imagined I had missed an announcement of such a thing. Wouldn’t there have been newspaper announcements, a ribbon-cutting, pictures of local officials? I was intrigued.

The idea that Columbia might have a warehouse district appealed to me.

Well…it isn’t quite what I expected.

Quickly becoming one of Columbia's new hot spots. Located off of Berger Road Hysteria Brewing Co, Bullhead Smokehouse and Lost Ark Distillery working together to provide you a new place to have fun.

It’s not a neighborhood. It’s a collaborative business venture between Hysteria Brewing Coming, Bullhead Pit Beef, and Lost Ark Distillery. You can check them out on Facebook. They’ve food, drinks, music - - and plenty of outdoor space on a nice day. An upcoming event in June will also be bringing in the T & J Waffle Truck. 

I don’t know the reasoning behind creating an entertainment venue and calling it a district, but there’s certainly no law against it. It’s a “concept”, I guess.

My imagination was on overdrive and I was hoping for an entire neighborhood of warehouses dedicated to some form of Columbia coolness. Well, who knows? This could be the start of something big. Maybe that area on Berger Road needs a larger than life advocate like Col Gateway to get the conversation going?

Hmm…

So, if The Warehouse District were to be bigger than one location, what would you want to see happening there?

The Out of Towners

 

On November 21, 2021, local residents were startled to observe an airplane, with an unusual message, flying overhead. From Twitter:

What in the backwards,tweedledumb-fhuk nonsense is going on here!? WHO approved this plane with a banner displaying a fetus and the phrase "overturn abortion" to fly around downtown #ColumbiaMD ??? I need answers!

And:

Why is a plane flying over  downtown #ColumbiaMD with a banner depicting a dead fetus? Kids saw this disgusting image. Who approved this travesty? Columbians demand answers.

Rather belatedly, the answer became clear yesterday morning when a group of people from the anti-choice organization “Created Equal” turned up at Wilde Lake High School to stage a similarly graphic protest during school drop-off time in the morning. Along with large posters of dead fetuses they displayed signs with messages like “Black unborn lives matter.” It wasn’t merely an anti-choice demonstration, but also a racially targeted one, as well. 

Although both school admin and parents were dismayed by the interference of Created Equal protestors on school arrival time, by law the group could not be removed. They weren’t on school property - - just close enough to insert themselves into the beginning of everyone’s day.

Following their stint at the high school, the group headed over to Howard Community College, turning up at Wilde Lake Middle School just in time for dismissal. It looks like they made a day of it. One wonders if they had a picnic lunch.

Created Equal is centered in Columbus, Ohio, founded by a man named Mark Harrington. Harrington has a B.A. from Ohio State in Marketing and Economics. What he is marketing, along with huge photos of dead fetuses, is the notion that an aborted Black fetus is the moral equivalent of a Black life taken by police brutality. 

While Created Equal invests a lot of effort in such race-specific arguments, the fact is that the group does absolutely nothing to protest police brutality, unequal treatment under the law, or medical and educational disparities. Nothing. They are not the first to try to paint abortion as Black genocide. From the first hand comments I saw yesterday, they seem to be doing it in a way that is transparently racist.   

A shout-out out to the group of community members who responded to this onslaught of out-of-towners by coming out to Wilde Lake Middle School to provide a peaceful barrier between the anti-choice demonstrators and the young people being dismissed from school. The story rated no more than a brief mention in Howard County Times, but the photo there is heartwarming. This is what caring about students looks like.

Photo credit Kevin Richardson, Baltimore Sun

There’s nothing “both sides” about this story. People came from out of town to target students. That’s it. And some brave and resourceful adults responded to make it clear that our students should have the right to come and go without harassment. Period. Aside from the stated issue of abortion, these confrontations are really about power. Someone who is older and wields power through lurid signs and derogatory language has the upper hand over someone who is younger and can’t get away. 

That sounds an awful lot like abuse.

We have strong laws that protect the expression of free speech in this country, and I think that’s a good thing. What happened yesterday, though, was a targeting of students in a situation where they could not adequately respond, defend themselves, or get away. The intent of Created Equal is to shock and upset people. That’s their stated goal. Combined with a message that suggests that Black teens are more sexually promiscuous and therefore need more admonishment and shaming, what we have here is a mission to harass students and specifically target Black teens in a place they have to be, and where they ought to feel safe.

Should that be protected?

I agree with County Executive Calvin Ball’s statement yesterday:

I’m disgusted by tactics of abortion opponents who are deliberately and needlessly subjecting our students to graphic images with the intent of shock. While I respect the rights of those who want to express opinions on critical topics, the scenes we saw today at Wilde Lake High School and Middle School and Howard Community College are not designed to inform.*

A word about protests. I saw some weird false equivalencies floating around on social media yesterday. Student-led protests, about issues that students care about, are in no way the same thing as what happened in Wilde Lake yesterday. The expression of student voice is a part of their growing up and maturing as thinking and caring members of our society. It is a learning experience that our school system acknowledges and values. For goodness sake, don’t use this egregious example of targeted harassment as an excuse to take away the free speech rights of our students. Even if the topics they address (Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ were named) make you uncomfortable.

After yesterday, the emphasis on valuing student voice is more important than ever.

*To read the statement in its entirety, visit the County Executive’s Facebook page. It’s also on Twitter.

The Green Grass of Home

 

To lawn or not to lawn: that is the question. Lovely, well-trimmed lawns are an expected feature of most suburban communities. In fact, some HOA’s have specific requirements on how each dwelling’s patch of green should be maintained. Most don’t even question the practice. It has become what we expect. 

On the other hand, it has become more and more apparent that household lawns are bad for the environment. Here’s a piece from the National Resource Defense Council addressing the issue:

More Sustainable (and Beautiful) Alternatives to a Grass Lawn

In a case of taking “the grass is always greener” a bit too literally, American homeowners have long strived to make their lawns brighter, lusher, and more velvety than their neighbors’. But all that competition has a devastating environmental impact. Every year across the country, lawns consume nearly 3 trillion gallons of water a year, 200 million gallons of gas (for all that mowing), and 70 million pounds of pesticides.

The article goes on to suggest alternative ideas that use fewer resources and contribute to less runoff. It’s a good jumping off point if you haven’t contemplated this already.

In Columbia/HoCo there’s been a good deal of advocacy around incorporating rain gardens as a part of home landscaping. But, until recently, I haven’t seem a whole lot of energy invested in challenging our lawn-centric culture. Until I read this piece from the Owen Brown Community Association’s Representative to the CA Watershed Advisory Committee: 

“New Rules Promote Groundcover in Place of Grass”, Ed Warner (OBCA ,April 25th)

Mr. Warner introduced me to the term xeriscaping. 

Xeriscaping is the use of plants such as ground cover to replace grass. Doing so helps reduce pollution from the mowing and fertilizing of grass, while also providing needed habitat for pollinators such as bees. 

I don’t know if xeriscaping is being promoted in all villages or only in Owen Brown. (I’m also not entirely sure how to pronounce it.) Is this something you are already familiar with? Can you see yourself switching up whatever lawn arrangement you have now with something more eco-friendly? Or, if you don’t have a lawn, what your opinion of these kinds of changes to the status quo?

Speaking of challenging the status quo, have you seen this local promotion for No-Mow May?

From Live Green Howard:

In the US, lawns are the single largest irrigated crop we grow! But, there are downsides to lawn care such as frequent maintenance (costing time and money), and environmental implications. Lawns provide little benefit to wildlife and when treated with pesticides, cause harm to bees and other invertebrates.

One way you can help is by mowing your lawn less, and taking part in #NoMowMay! Allowing the grass to grow for longer helps pollinators get the habitat and forage they need in this critical early part of the season. 

Learn more.

I think I should stress that this means you should mow less, rather than no mowing at all. We know what happens if you do that. 

As long as I can have my annual warm weather moment of going barefoot in the grass for a bit, I’ll be fine. I don’t need a lot of grass, and it doesn’t even need to be at my house. I just need to be able to slip off my shoes and socks and have that transformative sensory experience. 

So, what do you think? Are you on board for making some changes to your piece of the great outdoors? Have you already taken the leap? Do you think that there might be pushback from neighbors and/or community associations? Let me know.