The Feb. 22 opinion page was a masterclass on the quote by Maya Angelou: “When you know better, you do better.” All three pieces including the cartoon made me wonder what or why America keeps getting it wrong. Maybe it’s because we’re teenagers compared to the rest of the world, like a teen who gets into a car after a party with others knowing the driver is drunk and known to drive fast and ends up on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.

There’s the piece by a soldier who is glad that he was greeted with warmth after coming home from two invasions of countries who hadn’t thrown a stone at us (“20 years ago, residents gave warm sendoff to departing troops“). There’s the climate change urgency that needs to be done now even though the bickering and self-interests will probably prevent me from seeing it in the next few years I have left (“Another challenge of climate change – registering its urgency while living our lives“). Then there’s the Ash Wednesday reminder of the greed that the country is crushed by that prevents us from having fully formed brains to know better and then do better (“Ash Wednesday, Lent are opportunities to rethink ourselves“).

So sad because there are folks out there sounding the alarms kind of like the alarm that wasn’t heard soon enough in East Palestine, Ohio.

Portia Miles Smith

Oakland

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