Every 10 years, we are asked to complete our civic duty and respond to the census, but until I was in office, I never thought about what an impressive, important and, quite frankly, genius endeavor the U.S. census is. As an arts educator, I have a great interest in the story and the thought process of the U.S. census.
It’s difficult to know where to focus these days, with so many challenges created by the pandemic, with so many aspects of our lives impacted - from our health to our ability to move around, pay our bills, care for our children, peacefully assemble, even vote. We are trying to find new ways to make our voices heard, and the frustration and fatigue is very real; the desire to give up, normal. Finding grace has become a daily challenge and, at times, a chore that feels impossible. And even as we are working to find new ways to operate and cope with the mounting stresses of this moment, we are also having a national reckoning about our history, our equity and our national identity.
It’s hard to believe it has been nearly four months since we adjourned the 2020 session, early for the first time since the Civil War. In that brief time, we’ve held our first mostly mail-in election, with lessons learned in preparation for November. We have seen more than 125,000 deaths nationwide due to COVID-19, more than 3,000 of which have occurred here in Maryland. We have seen a renewed call for equity and civil rights, a local surge of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a national reckoning of our nation’s original sin of slavery.
I’ve just completed my second session in office, which ended once again with a history-making Sine Die, this time in the midst of an international crisis. I’m strangely calm. I have written several versions of this month’s column because I think it’s important in this moment to strike the right balance. To discuss local issues or a wrap-up of the legislative session feels inappropriate and blithe, dismissive of the larger picture and massive scale of a crisis, yet with the rapidly changing landscape of this outbreak, anything addressing our strategies today will be obsolete by publication. I know people are also seeking normalcy, but to act as if we are simply returning to normal feels disingenuous and negligent.
We are now in the throes of the 2020 legislative session. This session, expect to hear around 3,000 bills with issues as broad as codifying the protections of the Affordable Care Act, sports betting, criminal justice reform, vaping and e-cigarette regulation, transit projects, public-private partnership regulation, the 100th anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement and, of course, education. So, the challenge is, what should be the focus of this month’s column?
I grew up in Cape St. Claire, and when I was a child, I thought the distance to New York City and the distance to Ocean City were the same because it took the same amount of time to get each. Four hours. That’s how long we would sit in holiday traffic, stewing in our amber station wagon on our sojourn to sea and salt air.
Summer for so many of us is a time of renewal: a time to vacation, unplug, decompress and visit loved ones. Perhaps it is the heat as we leave the hottest month in recorded history, perhaps it is the endless traffic on the Bay Bridge and the beltway reducing our time of renewal exponentially, or perhaps it is the endless negative rhetoric coming out of Washington, but this summer has been challenging.
I recently returned to the summer camp, which has been my home for the last two decades. This is always a time of transition from the excitement of spring to the end of the school year, extended hours of daylight, planning and preparing for vacations, trips to the pool and the beach. As an artist, I work in a field that embraces change; my art form changes with the seasons, a parallel to politics, which I did not anticipate but which made my run for office all the more reasonable.
As I write this column, this has been a challenging week for women in what has been a few years beset with outrage. I realize that I am an outlier in an otherwise conservative district, so I tread on hazardous terrain. However, as the saying goes, “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” and we are in a moment in our history that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.
I didn’t want to write another tribute to Speaker Michael Busch as so many others have already written more articulate tributes and my time with the speaker, though immensely impactful, was painfully brief. After Sine Die, I felt quite alone in our district. However, I can’t stop thinking about the relentlessness of mourning and the cruelty of a calendar that refuses to yield to it.
