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By Doni Glover, Publisher
(BALTIMORE – September 16, 2023) – If I’ve been asked once, I’ve been asked a million times: Doni, who do you like in the upcoming mayoral election set for the Spring of 2024?
For the first time in a long time, I’m considering not having an opinion. My aim has always been to simply present the facts. Nothing more. Nothing less. Although I’ve done this to the best of my ability, I have grown weary of watching my city die slowly.
Baltimore politics, I concede, is simply too corrupt. And at the end of the day, it is the citizenry who suffers.
Now, the governor’s race – that’s always a decent thing to cover. It’s much cleaner. More eyes are watching the pot. It has national implications. It’s much more difficult to contaminate.
However, the local election involves a lot of behind-the-scenes dark activities with some very sordid characters who are driven by greed and racism. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Right in broad daylight. And frankly, it’s tiring.
So, I’d rather use my limited resources to do what journalists should do: present the facts and let the best candidate (whatever that means) win. Put differently, I’m not sure how much power the people actually have in Baltimore.
I’ve heard every excuse in the world as to why Baltimore can’t seem to shake the funk in which we find ourselves. I’ve heard it. You’ve heard it. ‘Oh, Baltimore has always been this way.’ ‘It was like that long before so and so came into office.’
Former State Senator Barbara Robinson shared something with me a while back about excuses, and I’ve never forgotten it: “Excuses are tools of incompetence used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness, and those who use them seldom specialize in anything else.”
At the end of the day, Baltimore has 11 schools that do not have air conditioning or heat. Yet, this week, a billion dollars was announced to renovate our two Baltimore sports stadiums. As a person who recalls the 1973 pitch by Maryland legislators for the Maryland State Lottery with the number one promise of money for education, I am utterly disgusted.
We have a schools CEO who makes over $300k per year, yet we have schools without the basics. Meanwhile, many of our counties’ schools are just fine. I don’t get it. I do not understand why the majority-Black Baltimore City Public Schools continue to flounder year after year after year.
And, there are no consequences.
We have failed these young people and tremendously so. We are cowards.
Frankly, we should be glad that we only have the Brooklyn Homes’ fiasco. We should be grateful that worse has not happened because we, as adults, have done everything possible to make our kids hate us. We fail to give them recreation. We fail to educate them. The streets are like war zones. And increasingly, we are seeing non-Black addicts flood the community in search of the most lethal brands of dope ever known to man.
Meanwhile, the mass incarceration of Blacks in Maryland continues to rise.
Question, are you surprised?
I say, thank God it isn’t worse.
