Our Advice to Politicians: Listen — or Lose
Here’s a fact about the politics of the new millennium. If you ask people what’s on their minds, you’d better listen.
Listening is the partnership that makes communication work. It’s the act of respect representative government is founded on. And it’s the first rule of the new politics that’s sweeping Chesapeake Country and the nation. Just as the founding fathers did, we 21st century Americans hold our elected representatives as equals, and we expect dialogue. Give us debate and democracy, not monologue and monarchy.
— No. 10, March 8
Final Four: A Tale of Redemption
Even if the Maryland basketball team loses on Saturday evening to arch rival Duke, they have taught us a lesson that applies to life as well as sports. They have demonstrated how, in a short time with courage and determination, potential can be realized and dreams come true. You can go from toast to the toast of the town.
— No. 13, March 29
“C” is for Chump, “D” for Dope and “F” for Flippin’ Burgers
Dear High Schoolers:
The next few years will determine if you have the luxury of being rebellious in the coming years — or whether you will be locked in a job that just might feel like a rubber sack over your head. Put another way, you will decide between now and age 21 or 22 how much freedom you will have for the rest of your life.
— No. 14, April 5
Bay Weekly at Eight: A Dream and Many Voices
As our eighth birthday approached, we’ve caught glimpses of ourselves in mirrors held up by you, the readers in this partnership.
Reader and contributor Carolyn Stearns writes: “I find I am looking forward to Thursday. I watch myself relishing your choices, wondering what you’re going to say next. You are holding your focus of intent beautifully. Bay Weekly really is a voice of the community. Now that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s not becoming the voice. It is the voice.”
— No. 16, April 19
Perils of Power: Nukes Back On Line in America’s Grid
Neither the industry nor the government has figured out what to do with spent nuclear fuel once it’s removed from the core of nuclear reactors.
Do you know where those deadly materials are today? Stored in swimming pools at plants in Calvert County and elsewhere around the country.
The baskets of glowing zirconium rods will leave the shores of the Chesapeake Bay for a new home about the time pigs learn to fly.
— No. 21, May 24
Annapolis’ Westgatehenge: A Tough Job Done Right
In a stroke of genius, the Westgate Circle Design Committee disarmed most every critic by choosing the unimaginable: a henge. Everybody was too busy figuring out what it is to complain.
What a henge is is an enclosed circle containing an arrangement of upright stone pillars to mark astronomical events. As in Stonehenge. Now, as in Westgatehenge.
— No. 27: July 5
Under the Long Shadow of the World Trade Center Towers
Like all else each of us will do in the future stretching before us into infinity, this paper comes to you under the long shadow of the World Trade Center towers.
In Chesapeake Country, the morning of September 12, 2001, dawned no less beautifully, though like you, we woke to a hangover of grief and the quick certainty that this was not a dream. An old moon climbed the blue sky alone. For the first time in many a lifetime, no airplanes shared that sky. Not a boat traced its way across the Bay. For a quiet moment, we savored the peace of isolation.
Then we remembered that, for good and ill, isolation is an illusion.
Our world changed yesterday. Like you, we’ll be a long time plumbing the depths of this change.
— No. 37: Sept. 13
Where We Stand in Chesapeake Country
Terrorists have taught us to think the unthinkable. They have insinuated fear into our dreams. They have inconvenienced our comings and goings. They may even separate us from what we love best.
But they cannot take the blue out of the sky or the sparkle off the water. They can’t keep us from striving to equal Chesapeake Country’s natural resources with our best works and deeds.
— No. 38: Sept. 20
Turning into a Better America
With our hands, with our money, with our solidarity, we’re building a better America.
That’s one way the terrorists underestimated us. Anger is the hardest of emotions to manage. Even the littlest of everyday angers wants to blaze through the bloodstream to erupt in a firestorm of retaliation. Yet stung to the quick as we are, we’ve weighed and measured our anger on the scales of justice.
We’ve done that, so far, as a nation, and we’ve done it as men and women. The senseless violence of spilled rage has been — though not absent — little in the news because we’ve had better things to do with our anger.
— No. 39: Sept. 27
Cal’s Last Swing
Cal Ripken left a truth or two behind when he walked off the diamond for the final time last weekend.
Ripken’s normalcy made him more endearing to us. It was like that last Saturday night when, in his last at bat, he made an out. And when, in the last inning with fans cheering him, the game ended with Cal Ripken in the on-deck circle, cheated out of one final moment in the sun.
For mere mortals like us, it was an ending to cheer.
— No. 41: Oct. 11
