When Congress passed the ADA in 1990, it promised equal access to public life, including the courtroom. Thirty-five years later, that promise is breaking down — especially in Maryland, where judges still decide who is and isn’t “disabled,” often without medical evidence.

When judges play doctor

The ADA is clear: Determining disability is a medical question, not a judicial one. Whether someone has ADD, PTSD or a brain injury must be established by qualified professionals — not a judge’s intuition.

This is personal to me and to millions of others, especially veterans. In my own custody case, a judge wrote that I was “struggling with serious issues” without any clinical evaluation. Those words, based on bias rather than medicine, restricted my access to my own child.

Across Maryland, nearly 70% of accommodation requests in family court are decided informally by judges without medical input. Nationally, more than 30 million Americans live with invisible disabilities, yet over half of courtroom accommodation requests involving cognitive or psychological conditions are denied outright. Because these disabilities don’t “look” disabling, they’re dismissed as exaggerations.

The human cost

These misjudgments have devastating consequences. Veterans with PTSD lose custody because their coping mechanisms are misunderstood. People with ADD are branded “uncooperative” for needing breaks during testimony.

In my case, the court granted a protective order even though no medical diagnosis was ever cited, and the judge cut off questioning before ruling. My confirmed conditions became a weapon I wasn’t allowed to defend against.

In Maryland, more than 60% of ADA-related court complaints are closed without a written decision. Nationally, fewer than 15% lead to corrective action. Without records, there’s nothing to appeal — a bureaucratic dead end that denies due process.

The “coordinator” illusion

Every Maryland county is supposed to have an ADA coordinator. In reality, these coordinators have no real power: All requests still funnel back to the judge. The result is a paper trail of compliance masking systemic neglect.

When I appealed my denied motion, the state office sent me back to the county, which admitted it couldn’t overrule a judge. Legal Aid and Disability Rights Maryland declined help because invisible disabilities weren’t their focus. I was trapped in a loop that thousands of Marylanders — veterans among them — know too well.

A system built to exclude

This isn’t about one judge or one case. It’s about a system structurally unequipped to uphold the ADA. More than 40% of Maryland adults with disabilities — and nearly two-thirds nationwide — live with cognitive or mental-health conditions, yet most never receive meaningful courtroom accommodations. The law protects them on paper but abandons them in practice.

What must change

The fixes are straightforward, but require political will and our collective civic calling: Empower ADA coordinators with independent authority; require written responses to all ADA motions to preserve appeal rights; create external oversight for judicial noncompliance; train judges to recognize and accommodate invisible disabilities.

And today is an especially pertinent reminder that we cannot keep our promises to honor our veterans hollow. (Any veteran dealing with injustice in the courts is encouraged to consider reaching out to my complimentary Military Family Justice Project.)

A promise worth keeping

On this Veterans Day — and every day — we must remember that service members bring home more than medals. They bring home silent scars our courts must acknowledge. The ADA promised equal justice, yet too often people like me — and countless veterans — are judged on assumptions, not evidence.

If a judge can decide someone isn’t “disabled enough” for protection, then no one’s rights are secure. Honoring veterans means ensuring our justice system is accessible, fair and informed — because equality under the law is a promise worth keeping.

Michael Phillips is a Maryland resident and disability-rights advocate who has spent years navigating the state court system while living with ADD and PTSD.

The shutdown was not a policy victory; it was a political calamity for Democrats. For weeks, the standoff dominated the headlines, delayed pay for federal workers and produced fractures within the Democratic Senate bench that forced a handful of senators to break with their party to move toward a resolution. Those defections and the public melee around funding negotiations exposed a failure of leadership at the top.

Compounding the damage was Schumer’s own confused posture during the fight — a sequence that left rank-and-file Democrats wondering whether he had a plan or had been carried along by events. In a leadership role, appearing to be responding rather than directing is fatal; senators need a leader who knows the caucus, can anticipate pressure points and keeps the team coordinated.

That lack of firm leadership during the shutdown is why Schumer has taken fire from all ideological corners of his party. Schumer may not have been one of the eight Democratic senators who broke ranks on Sunday to advance a deal to end the government shutdown, but the party’s firebrands placed the blame at his feet for failing to effectively rally his caucus to force a deal with the Republican majority to secure concessions on health care policy. The capitulation spurred calls for Schumer’s resignation from progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and centrist Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.).

This isn’t a one-off stumble. Voices across the party — frustrated by recent missteps — have openly questioned Schumer’s effectiveness and urged new leadership. When your own side expresses that level of dissatisfaction, it’s not mere displeasure; it’s evidence that confidence has eroded. Consider that the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, joined Republicans to end the shutdown, laying bare Schumer’s lack of control over not just his caucus but his own deputies. It’s clear why Schumer initially backed away from a shutdown fight with the GOP in March — he surely knew he’d face challenges in keeping his Democratic colleagues in line.

Age and stamina matter in a role that demands relentlessness. Schumer, now in his mid-70s, represents an era when long tenure alone was a qualification; today’s Democratic coalition is increasingly impatient with octogenarian and septuagenarian leaders who seem out of touch with the tactical agility modern politics requires. The party’s appetite for generational change is real, and leadership should reflect that appetite. Last week’s retirement announcement by Rep. Nancy Pelosi is another proof point.

Stepping down would not be an admission of failure so much as recognition of what the party needs now: a reset, clearer strategy and a leader who can unify rather than preside over fractious moments. Schumer’s success in avoiding a left-wing primary may have guided earlier choices, but avoiding challenge isn’t the same as demonstrating strategic competence. We don’t pretend to understand the progressives’ agenda for the Senate, but it appears that for the sake of Democratic prospects — and for the Senate to operate with effective opposition and discipline — Chuck Schumer should consider making way for the next generation of leaders. The country, and his party, will be better served for it.

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But “staring out the back door screen while listening to the news repeat itself” is not just the purview of those with more decades to reflect upon. Increasingly, loneliness is part of the human condition.

We’ve distanced ourselves from one another. Even in proximity, we seem more focused on our differences and disappointments than the condition of our whole cloth.

We are quick to blame “others” for what we fear or what we deem broken. In the capacity of conflict resolution facilitator, I’ve heard many self-described open-minded, prosocial individuals harshly judge those they know nothing about, citing skin color, religious beliefs, education level, nationality or income strata as justification.

The normality of podium-level dehumanizing, gun violence and anonymous, brutal enforcement of deportation crushes the lives of those directly affected and the spirit of witnesses. The denial of basic human needs, including belonging and dignity, observed daily, hardens hearts. Those cruelties encourage fear and diminish hope, leaving us all victims of the isolation Prine laments.

Scholars and pundits have considered how to heal our nation. The need for revolutionary change is common across national-level political and civic recommendations. I believe it is imperative at the grassroots level as well. The ability of individuals and communities to thrive depends on the quality and consistency of our engagement with one another. When communities are cohesive and principled, they’re more able to withstand leadership failures.

The importance of “weak ties” reemerged during the pandemic when we collectively mourned the absence of interactions with baristas, colleagues, neighbors and other casual acquaintances. In 1971, Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter published a then-groundbreaking paper on the importance of these casual relationships. “Weak ties connect you to networks that are outside of your own circle. They give you information and ideas that you otherwise would not have gotten.” Therein lies the ability to learn, cultivate empathy, gain competencies, build resilience and even secure employment. Revolutionary, for sure.

Admittedly, this seems as conceptually simple as a Hallmark Christmas movie. But quality interactions with loose acquaintances and strangers have become endangered. The proportion of Americans who feel they could reliably trust other Americans shrank to 34% in 2024. “Large shares of Republicans and Democrats associate negative traits with members of the other party,” including closed-mindedness and immorality.

Social distancing from one another extends to those we once held dear. A 2024 Harris Poll reports, “about half of U.S. adults are estranged from at least one close relation.” Political differences are among the reasons cited.

If we hope to fortify ourselves against a weakening democracy, we’ll need to toughen up. “Aggressive compassion,” a term I heard while interviewing residents of Sperryville, Virginia, population approx. 300, sums up the required skillset. “Kill yourself with kindness in the face of frustrating disagreement,” explained a Sperryville Community Alliance committee member with project planning responsibilities. This involves digging deep within oneself to find the patience, understanding and resetting of priorities necessary for connected coexistence.

Aggressive compassion requires living with discomfort periodically. Avoidance isn’t allowed, and debate is off-limits. Cynicism? Forget about it. Polite discussion, curiosity and consideration of alternatives may be substituted.

Willingness to forgo arguments is essential because “we have everything else in common,” explained another Sperryville resident after laughing deeply at the red-blue divide that exists elsewhere. And rarely does one succeed in changing minds. Facts tend to be irrelevant. Trust, however, is essential for communities to prosper.

“Hello in There” finds the grief we secrete away. The song’s truth is simultaneously excruciating to endure and impossible to ignore, like some of the encounters we must courageously face with aggressive compassion. Prine reminds us of the emptiness felt when confronted with cruelty or, worse, abject indifference. That pain is part of the “everything else” we have in common. It seems revolutionary to start with, “hello.”

Julie Garel (juliegarel@me.com) is a researcher and conflict resolution facilitator living in Bethesda.

On Oct. 29, we held a hearing on the notorious audit of the Department of Human Services (DHS). This audit found that DHS was not adequately conducting background checks on individuals who had direct contact with children under its care and neglected to reconcile its list of providers with Maryland’s Sex Offender Registry. Because of this, several children under state care were subject to abuse by an individual working for one of its contractors who was a registered sex offender. Another disturbing finding was the agency’s over-reliance on placing children in hotel rooms with one-on-one providers who are not licensed or, again, background checked. The impact of this finding was driven home only days after the audit was released when 16-year-old Kanaiyah Ward committed suicide in the hotel room where DHS was housing her.

The DHS response to this audit has been one of the worst I have seen in the 10 years I have served on this committee. DHS Secretary Rafael López discussed how his agency was working as a team, noting that they even have a hashtag. He spoke about how, before action could be taken to remove children from these unlicensed settings, they first had to develop a technological infrastructure to more easily determine their locations. It appears that the fact that the child’s name was on a spreadsheet rather than a modern, searchable database was a more urgent matter than the child’s physical presence in a hotel. He boasted that he had been able to search just that morning and determined that there were five children currently in hotels. What he did not mention throughout the entire hearing — until I asked him directly — was the death of Kanaiyah Ward.

I am on the record calling for the secretary to resign — not just due to this audit or Kanaiyah’s death, though either would be enough. The final straw came the night before the hearing when we learned that the secretary’s directive, issued the week prior, prohibiting the placement of children in unlicensed settings like hotels, had been violated just four days after its issuance. Secretary López lacks basic control over his department and is therefore not the person to fix this agency.

Over the last three years, Secretary López has had the opportunity to rectify some of these issues. When he came into office, he had a blueprint for the department’s problems, as identified in prior negative audits. The pace at which they have addressed the safety of children in DHS care is unacceptable — from criminal background checks to placing children in unlicensed settings — these should have been the number one priority of this administration, even if they had to make it happen in a more low-tech way. Such measures should be standard procedure in any department responsible for keeping children safe. Quality assurance processes and oversight of the local departments should have been addressed immediately as first steps in stopping many of the issues uncovered by this audit. A child died as a direct result of several of the findings in this audit — this is not an accounting error to be dismissed and ignored by a bureaucracy — this is a life.

Gov. Wes Moore’s reaction to Kanaiyah’s death, the audit and his support for Secretary López have been disappointing. His reflex response to many issues is to blame someone else; he blames the “inherited deficit” and attributes bad audits to the “previous administration,” while blaming the Trump administration for just about everything else. But the “it wasn’t me” excuse rarely works more than once, and it rings even more hollow as we near the end of the third year of his term. He cannot expect Marylanders to take him seriously about accountability when he does everything in his power to avoid it. Leadership comes with accountability. Leadership starts at the top. As Maryland’s governor, he is at the top.

Steve Arentz is a Republican representing District 36, including Cecil, Kent, Queen Anne’s and Caroline counties, in the Maryland House of Delegates.

Such rhetoric isn’t harmless. It corrodes the political imagination of a people already steeped in outrage. It plants in the public mind a simple but dangerous idea: that those who disagree with you aren’t just wrong, they’re evil. From that seed grows justification for all manner of destruction. Words like Pelosi’s don’t remain in the abstract. They trickle down into the cultural bloodstream, where they metabolize into rage, and rage, when sanctified by moral certainty, too often becomes violence.

When someone of Pelosi’s stature frames a political opponent as the embodiment of evil, it sets a moral permission structure. If Trump is “the worst thing on the face of the earth,” then what act wouldn’t be justified to stop him? This is the logic that inspires assassination attempts, not only against presidents, but also against high-profile cultural figures from conservative commentators like Charlie Kirk to members of Congress, judges and journalists who deviate from progressive orthodoxy. Once politics becomes moral warfare, the other side must be destroyed, not debated.

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is a divisive figure. He can be crude, impulsive and often reckless with language himself. But even at his most provocative, he exists within the political domain. His opponents have every right to criticize his behavior, policies and character. What they do not have the right to do is dehumanize him. Because dehumanization, once normalized, does not end with him. It metastasizes.

The American experiment depends on the belief that we can disagree without seeking one another’s ruin. Once that belief collapses, the republic becomes a battlefield of tribes, not citizens. And right now, that collapse feels increasingly close. The left sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy. The right sees the left as a cabal of totalitarian moralists. Both sides now speak the language of apocalypse.

Pelosi’s comment is not an isolated incident; it’s symptomatic of a larger moral panic among political elites who have lost faith in persuasion and replaced it with demonization. This isn’t politics as usual; it’s politics as exorcism. Every election is now framed as a cosmic struggle between good and evil, and the side that loses is not simply wrong but damned.

The irony is that the same Democrats who decry “political violence” are often those who sanctify the rhetoric that breeds it. You cannot call your opponent a fascist, a racist or “the worst thing on earth” and then act surprised when an unstable mind interprets that as a moral call to arms. When the moral legitimacy of violence enters the public square, even implicitly, the result is predictable: chaos justified in the name of virtue.

The United States has survived depressions, wars and assassinations, but what it cannot survive is the collapse of a shared moral language. Once every disagreement becomes a holy war, compromise dies. And when compromise dies, democracy follows.

What’s needed now is not more moral theater, but moral restraint. The true statesman knows that words can either cool or ignite the passions of the age. The responsible politician, whatever their party, should speak as if the nation’s peace depends on it because it does.

Pelosi may believe she’s defending democracy by condemning Trump as evil incarnate. But in doing so, she risks becoming the very thing she claims to oppose: a figure so blinded by moral outrage that she no longer sees her opponents as fellow citizens. And when that happens, democracy doesn’t just falter, it burns.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

An opinion piece about redistricting that ignores the Republican Party’s ongoing policies of restricting the right to vote is misleading. And not to mention that President Donald Trump’s right-wing Supreme Court has been a great supporter of the Southern states’ gerrymandering is puzzling to me. Praising Sen. Bill Ferguson without explaining the MAGA move to redistrict is not very persuasive.

In Mr. Baron’s op-ed about Baltimore rising, he thinks New Yorkers are going to “flee as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani implements his agenda.” One should note that Baltimore has a serious problem with poverty. In other words, there is rampant inequality in Baltimore and much of the United States. And capitalism is sure not solving this problem. In our capitalist system, Mr. Moneybags has much more access to politicians. In other words, many legislators take campaign donations that influence them, and not for the good.

I will close with the issue of medical care since the Democratic Party tried to save some semblance of what was available. The U.S. is almost all alone in allowing corporations to run the health care system. Where is improved Medicare for All? Capitalism has proved it is incapable of providing adequate and inexpensive health care for all. I would rather try socialism as the answer.

— Max Obuszewski, Baltimore

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Our favorable location hasn’t stopped our decades-long decline, and it alone won’t fuel a turnaround. Meanwhile, the economic policies that have caused a disinvestment crisis and fueled population flight remain impediments to a true revival.

And the apparent affordability of housing here is partly an illusion. The city’s tax rate on residential and business property is more than double that available a few miles away in the surrounding county, and that will be reflected in monthly mortgage bills. Every $100,000 a prospective home- or business-owner borrows to invest in the city carries a mortgage payment (for principle, interest and taxes) that is $95 (or 13%) higher than in the county. Insurance and utility charges are usually significantly higher in the city as well.

These disadvantages, plus higher crime rates and lower-quality schools, drive down property values and make it harder for city residents to build equity and wealth, and for city businesses to survive.

Mr. Baron is quite correct that Baltimore has many attractions and enormous potential — but the city will grow and prosper only if we get our policy act together.

— Stephen J.K. Walters, Baltimore

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Here’s what it was: Lionel Messi — global icon, soccer’s GOAT, the world’s most famous athlete — walking from the parking lot into a Lowe’s. That’s right, the hardware store. It sounds like one of those wacky AI hallucinations, but this is an actual, honest-to-God, real-life sponsorship.

I find this pairing to be highly inconceivable. Insulting, really.

Because let’s be honest: Lionel Messi does not shop at Lowe’s. Never has, never will. And yet, that’s what this ludicrous sponsorship is asking us to believe. I refuse.

Some celebrity athlete sponsorships make sense. Lebron and Gatorade, Shaq and Icy Hot, Charles Barkley and Subway. Others are a bit of a stretch, like Stephen Curry and CarMax, or Caitlin Clark and StateFarm. But I’ll give those the benefit of the doubt — everyone needs to rent a car from time to time, and everyone needs insurance.

But this whole business with Messi and Lowe’s, well, it’s like a sponsorship between Prince William and Waffle House, or Jeff Bezos and Burlington Coat Factory. It beggars belief.

Pop quiz: It’s Saturday morning. Where’s Messi?

Packing Chase Stadium as he dons the flamingo pink of Inter Miami? Or how about training with the reigning world champion Argentine national team for the 2026 World Cup?

Nope. He’s re-caulking the bathtub, and after that he’s firing up the weed whacker and edging the lawn. C’mon.

Here’s the deal, Lowe’s. The next time I run into Lionel Messi renting a power-washer in Aisle 4, I’ll eat crow. But until then, I refuse to buy into your chicanery for even one second. I refuse to waste any more time thinking or writing about this.

There’s something admirable about your audacity, but I’m not buying it — I’m going to Home Depot.

Zach Przystup (zprzystup@gmail.com) works for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs. He is the author of the Substack “Ask Your Father,” where he writes about parenting and family life.