It was an ordinary Valentine’s Day four years ago when my class was interrupted by incoming news of an active shooter in a Florida high school. On Feb. 14, 2018, a 19-year-old opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, but the impacts were far-reaching indeed.
“The threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name but included members of my family…” This is how Al Schmidt, the former City Commissioner of Philadelphia and a Republican member of the election board, described the intimidation he faced during and after the 2020 election.
“They were at places that seemed safe — but few spaces in America are guaranteed safe anymore.”
It has been more than 17 months since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on our United States Capitol — 17 months since someone planted a pipe bomb outside a building containing our then vice-president elect Kamala Harris, the first woman ever elected to the vice presidency; 17 months since people erected a noose and makeshift gallows outside our Capitol and cried for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence; 17 months since someone seemingly removed the panic buttons from a Democratic congresswoman’s office; and 17 months since Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters hurled racial slurs and beat Capitol Police officers on duty that day.
Fifty-five years ago this month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. published his fourth and final book: “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” In it, he described the turmoil then engulfing American cities as representing a new phase in the struggle for freedom: as a shift from a primary focus on dismantling Southern apartheid to a broader grappling with racism and economic inequality nationwide. Extending his analysis globally, Dr. King called for an end to the madness of the Vietnam War, for an eradication of global poverty, and for a recognition of nonviolence as the only sane path forward.
Speakers’ behavior at WSD school board meeting ‘disturbing’
With graduation ceremonies less than two weeks away for Camas-Washougal seniors, our first CHEERS goes out to our local graduates in the class of 2022. This class only had one “normal” year of high school before COVID hit, and then jumped into a world of remote learning, event cancellations, limited in-person communication with their peers and other mitigations meant to rein in our community’s COVID transmission rate. Despite so many upheavals, this class kept pushing forward through each new upheaval. May this resiliency stay with them throughout their adult lives.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the world, factory workers were humming along, assembling products just after components were delivered. It was called “just-in-time” production. It was efficient, predictable and cost-effective.
In my drought- and fire-plagued home valley, 40 miles north of San Francisco, a debate has been simmering for decades over a massive development planned on state-owned property.
I’m beyond fed up that the gender of the murderers are still largely absent from conversations about America’s mass shootings crisis.
