Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
June 2020
We wonder which is worse: authorities abusing our Constitutional rights or protesters wantonly damaging historic monuments dedicated to young revolutionaries such as Lafayette and Kosciuszko?
The spray-painting of statues of revolutionaries who fought for our freedom is not acceptable.
Many people believe it was a violation of First Amendment rights for the government to attack and arrest citizens protesting the murder of George Floyd and what they see as systemic racism in many police departments. To do so for the purpose of a frivolous and ineffective photo opportunity seems inappropriate.
On a windy afternoon this April, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, a vibrant blue-eyed 40-year-old, and her son Gideon hopped into a canoe to chase a ball that had blown into the water. But the wind and waves swept them into the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis. Then they disappeared.
The Kennedy family pioneered a new form of mourning, with 3,000 other friends and family gathering by Zoom.
I know the place where they were lost. I kept thinking of lovely Shady Side on the shore of the Bay while we were celebrating the life of that remarkable woman during an online memorial service.
The numbers are already grim. Worldwide, over 27 million have contracted Covid-19; nearly 875,000 have died from it. Public health experts caution that those numbers are certainly undercounts. Some deaths are mistakenly attributed to underlying conditions, not Covid-19, and many people who likely had the virus were not able to get tested. At-home deaths are often excluded. Overwhelmed health care systems lack the resources to generate reliable statistics.