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Wednesday, November 6, 2013
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Political football
Some boys in Olney are the big losers in a parentagainst-parent brouhaha over football. If you aren’t familiar with the story, the Mid-Maryland Youth Football and Cheer League divides teams in multiple divisions based on player ability. The lowerdivision team trounced its competitors and the upper division-team “wasn’t competitive at all,” according to a league board member. That led to the allegation that Olney was “stacking” better players in the lower division to beat the lesser players on other teams. BOYS BIG LOSERS Because of the allegaAS ADULTS tion, the league eliminated the Olney teams PUT WINNING from the postseason. AHEAD OF The Olney teams apSPORTSMANSHIP pealed the matter to the league’s board, where the decision was upheld after a 29-2 vote. Youths learn a lot playing team sports: sportsmanship, working toward a goal, personal responsibility, to name a few. What these boys have learned is that some parents have a warped view of what’s right and wrong. If you believe the charges, the Olney organizers did a disservice to the boys. By creating a team of ringers, the organizers allowed their desire for victory to overwhelm their sense of fair play. If you think the charges are trumped up, league officials relied on circumstantial evidence. As the playoffs proceed, the winning team will know it won only because one of the best teams in the league didn’t participate. We have far too many examples of youth sports ruined by overcompetitive adults. We all have tales of parents crossing the lines of good sense, shouting from the sidelines at coaches and officials. We all know kids who are missing out on childhood because they’re being pushed into athletics early, hoping they eventually score a college scholarship. Here, we have a youth football league in which either the local parents or the league officials are placing winning over the life lessons they owe these boys. Adults, somewhere, should be ashamed.
Hazardous isolation
When Timothy Leary implored, “Turn on, tune in, drop out” a generation ago, he wasn’t talking about iPods, smartphones and ear buds. But here we are, in a time of increasing technologically driven isolation, and the mantra fits. People walk around in their normal time and space, but with their minds and attention elsewhere. When we lost the umbilical cord of the rotary phone, we became free to socialize and carry on business talks wherever we went — and thus grew the phenomenon of Constant Connection. But we can’t blame FOR SAFE Apple or AT&T or Nokia TRAVEL, DON’T for creating a distracted BE A PRISONER culture. Walk-around enOF YOUR OWN tertainment was well estabDEVICES lished before that. The Sony Walkman was born in 1979. A tragic tale of fatal distraction — the death of Gwendolyn Ward’s 15-year-old daughter, Christina Morris-Ward — made us stop and think. On Oct. 31, 2012, Tina, as she was known, was on her way to Seneca Valley High School in Germantown, where she was a sophomore. She was doing what many people do. As Tina walked that dark morning, she was wearing headphones and looking down at her cellphone. She wore dark clothes as she crossed eight-lane Md. 118. A few blocks from the school, a car traveling legally under a green light struck her. Sad but determined, Gwendolyn Ward is doing her utmost to prevent similar heart-wrenching, avoidable deaths. She’s working with the Montgomery County Department of Transportation and Safe Kids Worldwide. She also spoke recently before local officials from Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia as the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board kicked off a Street Smart campaign. It’s a series of common-sense tips: for driving (be alert when passing stopped vehicles), for walking (look left, right, left before crossing) and for biking (ride with traffic, at least a car door away from parked vehicles). But for safety, so much hinges on awareness of and connection to the human and mechanical forces around us. Motor vehicles are large, powerful, potentially destructive forces. Whether you’re operating them or co-existing with them, please use the full extent of your senses while you get around. Know your surroundings, like a police officer would. Turn off, look around, tune in.
The Gazette Karen Acton, President/Publisher
LETTERS TOT HE EDITOR
We need to expand our road network In response to “Bus plan looks to future, not an auto-centric past” [letters, Oct. 16], the reader needs only to look at one thing in David Houck’s letter to understand where he stands — he is from Takoma Park. For years, any time I’ve raised traffic issues with anyone living inside the Beltway, I’ve heard the same tired refrain: “We don’t need more roads, we need more transit.” Guess what? If you live where I’ve lived for the last 15-plus years, and where most of the development has been for far longer than that — outside the Beltway — this is a nonstarter (full disclosure: I grew up in very closein Bethesda). While the rest of the state has invested in road improvements, we’ve really only seen the addition of the Intercounty Connector (40 years late). In the meantime, the Beltway drops to two through-lanes on the Inner Loop at Old Georgetown Road and Interstate 270 drops to two unrestricted through-lanes northbound at Md. 118 in Germantown. And, despite a major expansion of several miles of the road, I-270 has not seen any added unrestricted lanes on the spurs in at least 30 years! These places create major bottlenecks for auto traffic every day and must be addressed. Anyone who argues that we have constructed enough new roads or adequately expanded what we have in Maryland (specifically Montgomery County) is simply wrong. Our population and employment levels have exploded, but the road network has been effectively left behind or only half-baked. Even in my neighborhood, we built the first part of the Montrose Pkwy (on the books for many years), but the other half (into Wheaton) remains unfunded and unplanned.
As “auto-centric” road networks have failed to grow with development, and the vast majority of folks outside the Beltway are suffering because of this, addition to and expansion of the road network absolutely must be a primary objective of any transportation plan. Most cities have at least one good “beltway” (well planned and multi-lane, which does not describe the section in Montgomery County), and many have two (outer and inner). Most have more than one bridge crossing a major river between jurisdictions. Most have multiple highways that connect the city center with these beltways. There is nothing inbound in Maryland from Interstate 295/U.S. 50 to the George Washington Parkway in Virginia that serves this purpose and really only one way to get from Montgomery County to Northern Virginia via highway. We are woefully underserved from a road network perspective, and well behind the growth curve from any transportation perspective. I fully support the need for public transportation networks, as most of us do, but that will never serve a huge segment of the county’s population. I’d love it if I could walk to work, the grocery store and the gym. But I don’t live in downtown Bethesda/Silver Spring/Takoma. I live in Rockville, where I need to drive. There is no future in a transit-only approach, and no future that does not address all of this in the very near future. Folks who live in their urban cocoons, like Mr. Hauck, need to open their eyes to the rest of the county and state when they argue for transit as a priority.
as Ms. Bellis suggests, a dedicated bus lane.) There would be no need to build multiple buildings, i.e. Metro stations. There would be no need to use the massive amounts of electricity that the stations and the train would use. The bus lane could be adjusted easily for the intensity of traffic and parts of it could even include a dedicated bicycle portion. The bus lane could also be used for other, recreational purposes, such as foot races and bicycle races. We need to ask: Why are our representatives so interested in pursuing a seemingly unnecessary, but huge, expense?
I have really liked the handsome and personable Doug Gansler ever since he stopped by our house during his campaign for attorney general as my kids held a yard sale to sell some of their old toys. He was friendly to my children, and he bought a few books for his own family. Every time he made the news, I would point out to my kids: Remember him? That is Doug Gansler, that nice guy who came to your yard sale. I was sorry to read about his recent faux pas concerning underage drinking. The incident has helped me determine how to choose a Democrat to support in the primary, but not for the reasons you might think. I honestly don’t care that Gansler allowed his son to drink beer at age 18. (After all, my generation did it. Drinking was legal for 18-year-olds in those days, and we felt more like adults than today’s 18-year-olds.) Sure, it was hypocritical and irresponsible of Gansler to look the other way, but we all live with our own hypocrisies. What the incident underlines to me, though, is this: He and other parents rented a house at Bethany Beach for their children — who were graduating from an expensive private school — to enjoy Beach Week! How can this guy possibly understand middle-class Marylanders? My kids both went to Beach Week when they graduated from Rockville High School. And each of them had saved money from their part-time jobs to pay for it. Mr. Gansler’s son had a house handed to him! What must it be like to grow up with that sense of entitlement? I am glad that Mr. Gansler is a Democrat, and I am sure that he has done a lot for those of us who live more modest lives. But can he really understand us? That is my question. And that is the lens through which I will now examine the candidacy of Anthony Brown.
John J. O’Neill Jr., Rockville
Linda Di Desidero, Rockville
David K. Ohlrich, Rockville
A bus lane makes more sense Jennifer Bellis pointed out that the Purple Line should be proposed as a bus lane [“Make the Purple Line a bus lane,” letter, Oct. 16]. I am in total agreement with her views for the following reasons: 1. The toll highway, Interounty Connector/Md. 200, was built as a highway designed to handle traffic between Prince George’s County and Montgomery County, as is the intent of the Purple Line. That highway, by my observation, is barely used and must be losing quite a bit of money. Its tolls are expensive and that is one factor of its non-use. This would be the same for the expense of using a subway connecting those two counties.
Supposedly it is designed for use by lower-income persons for access to jobs, but they could not afford to use it. 2. A portion of the Purple Line would eradicate or constrict the Capital Crescent Trail. That is one of the most used, if not the most used, parks in the state of Maryland in terms of daily numbers. In these days of constant promotion for a “green” ecology, the Purple Line seems to be an extreme oxymoron. 3. If such a transportation route between the counties is actually needed, a bus lane using cross-country streets already built, such as East-West Highway, would cost a fraction of the Purple Line. (Even with,
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