Well, I took one day off and my page views have gone up dramatically. Not just for the last post I wrote, but for every single one in the recent past. It’s as though someone in an office somewhere discovered a backlog of page views that had never gone through and awarded them to me retroactively. Go figure. ***** Folks, we’re having a rash of the following behavior in Howard County. Aside from the influence of national politics, which is probably another whole post altogether, the influence of social media in this behavior cannot be ignored. Social media’s business model is dependent upon clicks and engagement. Therefore it’s not enough to share information, feature images, or promote events. The machine feeds on clicks and engagement and it doesn’t matter whether it’s truthful or helpful. And that’s where it intersects with our worst impulses. It tells us - - no, begs us - - to have and express an opinion on things which we don’t know enough about and don’t really ha...
This piece originally ran on October 11, 2021. The Biggest Lie and Its Undoing Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Howard County and in a growing number of places across the US. County Executive Calvin Ball made the announcement of the change in September of 2020. Howard County replaces Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day “Indigenous and Native American history is embedded in our nomenclature and our geography — Patuxent, Potomac, Kittamaqundi. And yet there is a clear erasure of their history and their connection to our land,” Ball said. “Indigenous Peoples’ Day presents an opportunity of all ages and backgrounds to learn more about the people who were here before Columbus and colonization. Representation matters, but it must be more than a rallying cry.” It can be difficult for some of us to let go of the tales from our early years about brave explorers who discovered new lands. But all those stories are rooted in the basic falsehood that any places that Western Europeans didn’...