Today’s word is “disenfranchised.” A lot of people are throwing it around lately. A lot of people don’t appear to know what it means. The Columbia Association has not disenfranchised any villages or the people who live in them. This is what has occurred: The CA Board of Directors voted to remove three members for violating their own ethics policy. The CA Board created an enforceable ethics policy. After a thorough investigation, they enforced it. Which part of that do you disagree with? Ethics? Investigation? Enforcement? Friends, we need to talk. Something about the CA rep/Board Members that many people may not understand is that, unless they are personally motivated to be responsive to their own communities, they aren’t really required to do so. Honestly, you can’t make them. I’ve tried. When I served on the Oakland Mills Village Board our CA Rep would attend meetings, participate in discussions with the board about community issues, receive complete feedback about our c...
Yes, I remember the celebrations for the Bicentennial. I was in high school. Yes, it felt so much better than what we are experiencing today. I’ve seen a lot of such sentiment online recently. But what I don’t remember from 1976 were all the things that I didn’t see. I was a white teenager in an upper-middle class community. I attended an integrated high school that had been integrated through busing and, in four years, there were only two Black students in my “academic” classes. We were in the same building but were still in many ways completely separated. I knew about the Civil Rights Movement and believed in equal rights for everyone but had precious little opportunity to interact with people who didn’t look like me or live like me. I knew that some people were probably racists but had no understanding of continuing racist systems - - how racism was deeply embedded into the law, and financial systems, and even in schools. I was raised by nice white liberals to b...