I submit, however, that I am on sounder ground in remarking that I have smelled the ubiquitous, putrid aromatics born by the legalization of recreational marijuana in New York City and Washington, D.C., and it doesn’t work. Indeed, the offense to the olfactory organs has become a public nuisance. Recreational marijuana users are not only harming themselves by squandering time and money on juvenile thrills. They harm others by interfering with their use and enjoyment of public property, including sidewalks and parks. You can’t escape it. There is nowhere to hide. It is a modern version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I do not think there are legal answers to the mushrooming of marijuana use at all times and in all places. Criminalization does not work. Nor does decriminalization. Oregon recently reversed decriminalization of possession of a minor quantity of certain drugs (excluding marijuana). It did not dent drug addiction or deaths from fentanyl overdoses. Portugal has been bipolar — decriminalizing possession of all drugs while increasing police patrols to deal with increased crime and drug addiction.

Marijuana abuse can only be ameliorated with a cultural change, not a legal change. The home, the classroom and the pulpit must provide intellectual and moral excitement far beyond what a marijuana high can offer. That means reading, discussing and appraising the classics and the Bible in search of truth and justice without ulterior motives. It is the only love that never grows old. In other words, we have met the enemy, our debased culture, and it’s us.

Marijuana users should be ostracized not only for interfering with the use and enjoyment of public property but for dereliction of citizen duties. We citizens are the ultimate sovereigns. We are the answer to Roman poet Juvenal’s rhetorical question, “Who will guard the guardians?” Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Or as Justice Louis D. Brandeis put it, “Sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But how can you be scrutinizing, questioning and publicly calling government to account for its chronic abuses if you are high on marijuana rollicking in fantasyland? Is that what our ancestors fought for at Lexington and Concord? Was the shot heard round the world by the Minutemen at North Bridge intended to celebrate marijuana use?

As culture decays, laws multiply. The first federal restriction on drugs surfaced 138 years after the Declaration of Independence in the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. They have expanded manifold since then. President Richard Nixon declared in 1971:

“America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive. I’ve asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive.”

But new and harsher laws did not diminish the epidemic, just as Prohibition did not lessen alcohol abuse. The economic law of supply and demand is stronger than laws passed by legislatures. Drugs will not be trafficked if there is no demand. And demand is a product of culture transmitted at home, in school and in churches, synagogues and mosques. A culture that exalts critical thinking, justice, self-discipline and wisdom as the locomotives of life — and everything else as the caboose — and finding expression in social admiration and awards will experience no drug abuse.

Leaders determine culture by oratory and example to which the wise and honest may repair, not by legal edicts or decrees. Former first lady Nancy Reagan’s bare injunction, “Just Say No,” was as futile as King Canute’s telling the waves to go back.

Mankind is made of crooked timber. True leaders lessen the crookedness by pushing culture toward the straight and narrow. The test of progress is whether you can walk the streets of New York City and Washington, D.C., without confronting an attack of marijuana fumes.

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.

Anti-Israel, pro-terror protestors have reignited their protests at Columbia University in New York.

The last encampments and protests, which drew nationwide ire from all sides of the political spectrum, saw thousands of students repeating the slogans of terrorist organizations and striking fear into the hearts of its Jewish students.

With antisemtism on the rise in New York City, will Columbia clamp down and suppress these anti-Jewish and anti-Israel protests? Or will they continue to allow their student body to be fearful of attending school and enable outsiders to commit acts of hate against Jews?

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.

In a fight between local residents and unlicensed cannabis stores, the locals are winning.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul have shut down more than 1,000 illegal cannabis shops. City and state officials have seized over $63 million worth of illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia.

This is a side effect of legalized cannabis.

In New York City, more than 779 illegal stores have been padlocked, according to Hochul’s office. The New York State Illicit Cannabis Enforcement Task Force has closed an additional 230 across the state.

The video above shows a little of what New York City has become.

Is this what your city looks like?

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.

But to acknowledge error is heavenly.

Gov. Wes Moore conceded error in neglecting to promptly correct his claim to a Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan. The combat veteran who risked that last full measure of devotion for his country had been recommended for the award, but the recommendation may have been lost in the chaotic processing during wartime. It has been resubmitted by Gen. Michael R. Frenzel, who championed the Bronze Medal in the first instance. Over Moore’s initial reluctance, then Lt. Col. Frenzel urged the governor to make the claim in applying for a White House fellowship in 2006 at age 27, confident that the award would ultimately be forthcoming. The governor’s sin, if it was so, was venial.

The governor deserves praise for his military service. He was a first lieutenant in Afghanistan, serving in a unit called Task Force Devil to stabilize the country’s eastern mountains. As reported in The New York Times, “An officer evaluation report from Mr. Moore’s superiors praised him as ‘a top 1% officer,’ volunteering, ‘He is the best lieutenant I’ve encountered during Operation Enduring Freedom.’”

Moore was laureled with a National Defense Service Medal, an Afghanistan Campaign Medal, an Armed Forces Reserve Medal with “M” Device, an Army Service Ribbon and Parachutist Badge. He has nothing to be ashamed of. Even General and President George Washington, as a youth, owned up to cutting down a cherry tree, according to Parson Weems in “The Life of Washington.”

A flea has been magnified into an elephant. Those who know Moore know integrity is his north star—a rarity among politicians. Their claims are typically wild exaggerations or misrepresentations. Former disgraced Congressman George Santos comes to mind. Indeed, truth is the first casualty of vaulting political ambitions. The wish becomes father to the thought. Politicians campaign on the wisdom of Mark Twain that “a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on.”

Baltimore should be proud of Governor Moore. Republicans should be applauding his exemplary military record rather than fixating on a trivial stumble. The same goes for the media.

We need the best and the brightest to run for public office. But that will not happen if they risk vilification or calumny for youthful misjudgments.

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.

Fix your eyes on the diminishing support for witnesses and crime victims as a superior metric in giving report cards to politicians.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris touts her credentials as a former prosecutor and California attorney general. But what has she done for victims and witnesses?

Congress enacted the Victims of Crime Act in 1984 creating a Crime Victims Fund to distribute grants to state and local first responder law enforcement entities to assist both victims and witnesses. The two commonly overlap. In 1988, the Office for Victims of Crime within the Department of Justice was established to administer the grant program.

In Maryland, the funds support victim-witness coordinators, also known as specialists, within each of the state’s 23 counties and the City of Baltimore. The coordinators act as sherpa guides to victims through criminal proceedings, for example, making victim impact statements during sentencing or providing the necessary transportation, therapy, food and even parking validation to facilitate attendance at trial.

But recently, a worrisome trend has surfaced. Funds have been diverted to nonprofit organizations concerned less with victims and more with revamping police departments.

For example, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott created a crime-fighting entity, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE), led by a novice in public safety (a former radio show producer). MONSE largely copies what the Baltimore Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s Office already are doing, which multiplies costs for the same output. It’s political patronage at its worst.

And Gov. Wes Moore is bettering Scott’s instruction in undermining the federal grant program. The Baltimore Sun recently disclosed that the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth and Victim Services slashed $22,583 from Carroll County’s annual $425,664 criminal intelligence grant to arrest gang violence preying on a small, rural county. But the office did not stop there. It cut funding for virtually every major law enforcement unit in Maryland, including majority-minority jurisdictions.

Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office lost $311,771, meaning the loss of one full-time employee and shrinking victim housing services by $273,000, which will impair victim safety. The Baltimore Police Department and State’s Attorney’s Office took staggering hits from the governor’s penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to crime.

Ivan Bates, head of the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office, received a shocking 11th-hour email from the governor’s office cutting victim-witness funds by an astronomical $400,000 from the figure anticipated without granular explanation because of professedly more important unnamed priorities.

Baltimore has been stigmatized as the most dangerous city in America, notwithstanding a downward trend in homicides and shootings. What can be more important than upgrading criminal law enforcement to the citizenry? Preventing, punishing and deterring crime is the first duty of government — article 1 in the social contract. The keystone of that duty is assisting victims and witnesses of crime. Without them, law enforcement is a fool’s errand.

The grant process also confounds necessary law enforcement planning. Grant allocations are made at a time certain. But the funds themselves are chronically delayed for weeks if not months. Is law enforcement expected to find bridge loans like a construction contractor? The Maryland State’s Attorneys Association was allocated a grant on July 1. It has yet to be informed whether its award has been approved or cut. This is no way to run a railroad, much less urgent criminal law enforcement.

Moore should be applauded for standing firm on reforming the juvenile justice system, signing legislation tackling vacancies in public safety jobs and upgrading victims’ compensation services. He has fallen on the job, however, in optimizing use of victim-witness funds to prevent hardened criminals from evading justice.

Cooperating victims and witnesses are the royal flush of criminal prosecutions. Johnny-come-lately nonprofits are the two of clubs. Moore should direct victim-witness funds accordingly.

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.

That was then, this is now.

Russell, at middle-age an accomplished actor with a long list of stage credits, will take a lead role in Chesapeake Shakespeare Co.’s production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” part of the Baltimore theater community’s three-year celebration of August Wilson’s 10 plays about 20th-century Black life.

Russell will play Seth, owner of the boarding house, circa 1910, where the story unfolds. It’s his first role with Chesapeake Shakespeare but one of many he’s had in his hometown. Russell has been a member of Everyman Theatre’s talented resident company since 2019. He’s traveled far and wide to play all kinds of roles, some Shakespearean, over a professional career stretching back 32 years.

Not bad for a shy guy.

And even more interesting given his first career choice — Baltimore police officer.

Jefferson Russell’s life provides a good lesson for any young man or woman — in high school or just out, in college or just out — who might be quietly fretting the road ahead. Some have decided on a career already, but most are still uncertain, and that’s quite all right. Jefferson Russell will tell you that.

His life’s journey affirms that the choices you make at 18 or 22 do not lock you into a career. You could be on a completely different path at 30 or 40 or 50.

And if you think you’re too shy — or too this or too that — you might prove yourself wrong, in a good way.

The son of William and Alice Russell, a doctor and nurse, Jefferson Russell got a taste of acting when he was a boy growing up in Baltimore. His mother knew her youngest child was on the shy side, so she enrolled him in a couple of summer theater programs for kids.

But by the time Russell was a senior at City, he had decided on a career in law enforcement. He studied sociology and criminal justice at Hampton University in Virginia. He graduated in the mid-1980s, around the time Kurt Schmoke became the first Black man elected mayor of Baltimore. That got Russell interested in serving his hometown.

“I decided to come back home to be a police officer because it really felt like a shift, a big shift,” he says. “And I wanted to be a part of it. …[Becoming an officer] was, truly, to work for my people, my neighborhood and my city. I wasn’t interested in being a police officer any place else.”

His first stop was Greenmount Avenue and Eager Street, his post as a new officer in the tough Eastern District, in the midst of the war on drugs. He spent four years in uniform before deciding to take another path.

Two things had bothered him — the increasing number of young boys getting in trouble for acts of violence and the behavior of fellow officers. “You see certain things,” he says. “You’re exposed to certain things, and I didn’t need to be a part of it.”

He thought he could be most effective counseling kids instead of arresting them. “I didn’t get the job to knock heads,” he says.

So he took a state position as a juvenile probation officer, checking up on minors in Prince George’s County who were under court supervision.

Russell found that work rewarding, but, as it turns out, the seed for a career in acting had been planted several years earlier, back at Hampton University.

In his freshman year, Russell was homesick and wanted to transfer to another school. His mother would have none of that and, as she had done similarly when he was a boy, she suggested her son “go to the theater department and see what’s going on.”

And that’s exactly what he did. Russell got busy with student productions. During an exciting and successful trip to Chicago for a drama competition with other college students, the acting seed took root.

“My world just opened up,” he says.

Still, he came back to Baltimore, entered the police academy and went to the Eastern District. During his years as a police officer and his time in juvenile justice, acting remained a side gig, not a career.

Which gets us to the other lesson from the life of Jefferson Russell, this one for the adults in the room: If you see something in a young man or woman, some skill or talent that they do not see themselves — because they lack confidence, because they’re shy, because they’re distracted — you have a duty to point it out. You have an adult responsibility to be encouraging.

“I have benefited from people seeing things in me that I was not ready to recognize,” Russell says.

His parents, especially his mother, supported him in his endeavors. And at Arena Players in Baltimore, Amini Courts and Donald Owens, the artistic directors, encouraged Russell to be an actor. “Those two people are my mentors,” he says, “and they are people who see something in you that you don’t see in yourself.”

What they saw was what has emerged — a skilled actor with a robust persona and arresting stage presence. Not bad for a shy guy.

We met on a day in June, along a branch of the Potomac River. He was a pleasant guy, eager as a farm boy to go fishing, but his near toothlessness made him seem much older than his years.

Cue Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont:

“Far too many Americans, especially in rural areas, do not have access to a dentist, which forces them to either travel long distances or go without the care they need. Very few dentists accept Medicaid (for low-income patients), preventing the most vulnerable people in America from getting the dental procedures they need.”

That’s what Sanders had to say in May when he filed legislation to expand government-funded dental coverage for seniors, veterans and low-income families. The Comprehensive Dental Reform Act of 2024 would also increase the number of dentists and dental hygienists, filling a particularly big need in rural areas.

More than anyone in the Senate, Sanders points out inconvenient truths. Like the late Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore, a champion of oral health who pushed Maryland to expand dental coverage for the disadvantaged, Sanders wants the federal government to do more through Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The nation has a dental crisis, he says, and brings data to the claim:

“Nearly 70 million adults and nearly eight million children have no dental insurance and many of those who do have dental insurance find that coverage to be totally inadequate. …One out of five seniors in our country are missing all of their natural teeth. Over 40% of children in America have tooth decay by the time they reach kindergarten.”

Research and surveys by Kaiser Family Foundation show that half of U.S. adults have difficulty paying for health care and, in recent years, 60% of Americans said they put off getting the services they need. Dental care, Kaiser reported, is the service most likely to be delayed due to costs.

Sanders again: “The situation has become so absurd, that each and every year hundreds of thousands of Americans travel to countries like Mexico, Costa Rica, India, Thailand and Hungary where it is much less expensive to get the dental care they need even after paying for round-trip airfare and hotel stays.”

In Maryland, some people wait until they hear about a free dental clinic.

There’s a big one scheduled for Friday, Sept. 13, and Saturday, Sept. 14, at the Wicomico Youth & Civic Center in Salisbury. It’s called the Eastern Shore Mission of Mercy, and when it was last held, in 2019, more than 1,100 men and women showed up for help with their teeth.

This year’s event will be the first large one since the pandemic — smaller missions are held around the state at different times — and organizers expect more than 100 dentists, hygienists and dental assistants to volunteer.

“It’s very rewarding, but it’s also very exhausting because there is so much need,” says Dr. Celeste Ziara, the president-elect of the Maryland State Dental Association who has been volunteering for the missions for several years. “About four or five hours into it, you’re exhausted, but you keep going because the line never stops.”

The doors open each day at 7 a.m. for hundreds of adults who either have no insurance or have no provider willing to take patients on Medicaid.

Each patient goes through a medical assessment and dental triage, including an X-ray, before being escorted to one of the rented dental chairs on the floor of the civic center. Some people just need a cavity filled or a tooth extracted. Others have a whole mouthful of problems, but can only have one issue, the most urgent, treated at the mission. Usually that’s all there is time for.

“Sometimes patients will come in and say, ‘This front tooth is broken, it really bothers me, I don’t like the way it looks,’” says Judy Forse, a hygienist based in Salisbury. “But they might have a bombed-out tooth with an active infection. They’re worried about that front tooth when in actuality we should be concerned about the tooth that’s infected.”

Forse expects each day of the clinic to run nonstop for 10 to 12 hours. She says she could use more volunteers to work in shifts so that fewer patients are turned away.

“Many of them will get there very early in the morning, and they are waiting all day long to get a tooth extracted,” says Forse. “The goal is to make sure they don’t have any type of infection in their mouth, anything that could send them to the hospital. That’s the priority.”

It’s humbling, Forse says, to see so many people in need, but hugely rewarding to see so many grateful for dental care they thought was out of reach.

I’m of two minds about this — appreciative that dental professionals in our state are willing to stage a free clinic for those in need, but also bothered that dental care must come to some like this. To quote Sanders one more time: “Dental care is health care and health care must be considered a human right, not a privilege.”

High grocery and gas prices? Blame it on Biden’s feckless policy toward Russia that invited the war in Ukraine, unforgiving oil sanctions and the curtailment of grain shipments from the Black Sea.

The Middle East was a zone of peace until Oct. 7, when Hamas launched its dastardly attack on Israel, featuring the killing and raping of civilians and taking of hostages. Hamas attacked because of Biden’s irresolution in backing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unconditionally.

Hamas craved war. It has gotten more than it asked for. Its leadership has been exterminated. Its popularity has plunged as it has been unable to protect 2.3 million Palestinian civilians from the masterful Israel Defense Forces. Hamas is on the verge of extinction. Unconditional surrender is at hand. Netanyahu will be running victory laps soon. His iron grip on power remains undiminished.

Hamas is on its last legs. Death and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank continue unabated. In desperation, Hamas has infiltrated Congress, American cities run by Democrats and international bodies in a futile effort to turn the world against Israel. But the Hamas propaganda is not working.

It has provoked violent protests and property damage in London and other parts of the United Kingdom, while the rest of Europe remains less convulsed.

The Arab world withholds any criticism of Israel. They want no part of Palestinian refugees to disturb their stable, peaceful, dictatorships. The Arab world is sick of Hamas, of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and an array of Islamic “political parties” amounting to nothing more than surrogate paramilitary militias controlled by Iran. Hezbollah is on the edge of losing political sway in Lebanon with its chronic, vicious attacks on northern Israel.

A terrifying flow of mature and experienced fighters from al-Qaida, ISIS, and variegated Islamic organizations traces back to the evil mullahs of Tehran frightened of teenagers without head scarfs and on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons on Biden’s watch.

The Taliban have created a clearing house and bus terminal to transport merciless Islamic terrorists through Afghanistan headed for Europe and the Americas to perpetrate a second edition of 9/11 after racing through our open borders. Their alarming numbers are off the charts of the intelligence community. Muslim terrorism is at our doorstep, but why does the Arab world not speak?

The Palestinian issue has overstayed its welcome. Hamas’ leadership and Iran frown on peace. They crave power and are enraged that Israel has taken their power away forever. For Hamas, the Palestinian people who voted them into power are expendable poker chips in the propaganda war. The Palestinian leadership urged on by Iran are indifferent to the deaths, destruction and disease inflicted on 2.3 million Palestinian civilians brought on by Hamas.

Palestinian leaders summon the Arab world’s support, but all that is returned is radio silence. The carnage in Gaza is horrific and hard to watch, but the fault lies with Hamas, not Israel. Spectators in Washington and Democratic-controlled cities display faux outrage at Israel, hoping to attract votes. The game won’t work. Billions of dollars of weapons continue to be transferred to Israel without conditions. Israel’s famed precision strikes at Hamas leaders in Lebanon and Iran minimize collateral damage or civilian deaths. Indeed, the IDF deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for its unprecedented humanity in wartime.

The complexion of the Gaza conflict is evolving toward an unconditional Israeli victory within short weeks or months. Body counts do not lie. One puzzle remaining is Mahmoud Abbas. Have you forgotten? Abbas’ term as head of the Palestinian Authority expired in 2009, but he has lingered on for 15 years for the lack of anything better to do. The world is breathless for his appearance — our deliverance from Palestinian strife. There can be no ceasefire in Gaza until President Abbas surfaces.

Moving on to Ukraine. The other war. Fools in Congress and their financial benefactors, such as defense contractors, are cheering Ukrainian tanks operating inside Russia and gratuitously killing Russians to provoke a retaliatory tactical nuclear strike against American soldiers taxing Veterans Affairs’ hospitals with the wounded. The Ukraine war was preventable. It did not start with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. It did not start with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It started years ago when the United States encircled Russia with new NATO members softly urging regime change against President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a clear case of self-defense like America’s response to Pearl Harbor. Putin is no dodo. He is reaping a huge propaganda victory over the United States with his Ukraine invasion, winning key friends like China, North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, India and South Africa.

Money drives conflict, and arms manufacturers and defense contractors reap jumbo profits. But who pays? American families whose children fight these stupid, preventable wars. If you are worried, you should be.

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.

The shadows excited him.

“I like what I’m seeing,” Harris called out. “This looks very encouraging!”

Dressed for work in khakis and a T-shirt, Harris stepped down from where we had just parked — on River Road in Grantsville, Garrett County — and he craned his neck into the five-foot tubes to assess the progress of trees he and the Amish lads had planted.

The shadows had been those of green leaves.

“Lots of leaves!” Harris called out, expressing the glee of a young farmer seeing his hard work sprout through soil.

Though Harris is not a farmer, his job puts him in contact with them and other landowners in Maryland’s westernmost county. He manages Trout Unlimited’s project to improve habitat and water quality for native brook trout — a beautiful fish that has managed to survive 300 years of human invasion, from colonial settlements through coal mining, suburbanization and now the climate crisis.

Our remaining native brook trout populations are primarily in Garrett County and in the Gunpowder Falls watershed northwest of Baltimore. They have been imperiled by the loss of habitat and by the centuries-long degradation of the little veins of water that flowed through dense forest before farmers cleared land for crops.

The big concern now is the effect of climate change on water temperatures. Brook trout need cold water. They need to be able to migrate to it during the hottest times of the year. They need to be able to spawn without abnormal flooding blowing out their redds.

About 40% of Maryland’s brook trout waters are on privately owned land. So Harris’ duties include convincing people to plant more trees along the creeks, licks and runs that flow through their properties. A healthy and full tree canopy can help offset Code Red temperatures.

The Amish farmer on River Road, along the Casselman River, was glad to get what Harris offered — hundreds of maple trees for his maple sugar operation, fencing to keep his cows off a small creek, and more trees in the lower part of his property near the river. All Harris had to do was guarantee that the trees were privately funded — from the local chapter of Trout Unlimited and other organizations — and not in any direct way connected to government. (While they pay taxes, the Amish prefer not to receive benefits from government programs.)

The farmer’s two sons helped Harris do the spring plantings. The tubes protect the trees from deer. Some of the landowners he’s approached find the tubes unsightly, Harris says, but, if all goes well, they can usually be removed after three years.

The trees on the Amish property will reforest a section of land where a small creek flows to the Casselman. The creek provides summer passage for the brook trout to areas upstream where they find cool water from springs. (Brook trout survival typically requires water temperatures below 68 degrees.)

Planting trees has a huge effect on just about everything.

“It’s good for the birds,” Harris says. “It’s good for bugs, good for fish, good for water temperature. There’s all kinds of things that trees do that nothing else does. … The best thing you can do, from a habitat standpoint, is plant trees.”

And there are funds available for that, Harris says.

Even so, as he and volunteers with the Upper Gunpowder Falls Watershed Brook Trout Conservation Partnership have learned, some landowners prefer big lawns or open fields mowed right up to the banks of a stream.

Driving through Carroll County, I came across the South Branch of the Gunpowder Falls and could not believe what I was seeing — a property that looked like a golf course, except it wasn’t a golf course. It was a vast field without a single tree. The South Branch coursed through the property, completely exposed to the summer sun.

Some people find this sort of landscape beautiful. I think it’s an awful waste, a lost opportunity to improve water quality and habitat for the brook trout. It also represents hundreds of gallons of fossil fuels burned to keep the place mowed.

You can’t force people into being good stewards of their land. But you can at least try to convince them of the value of planting trees. That’s what volunteers with the Upper Gunpowder project have been doing for several years because the basin north and west of Prettyboy Reservoir supports the second-highest number of brook trout in the state, about 25% of the Maryland population.

River Valley Ranch, the summer youth camp and retreat in Carroll County, got into the act with a grant from the state in 2019. The Gunpowder flows right through the place and Muddy Creek meets it there. The project resulted in plantings along the stream banks to reduce erosion and improve habitat for brook trout.

But there’s a lot more to be done throughout the vast Gunpowder watershed. A lot of landowners need to plant trees. Autumn is a good time for that. Plant trees, save the brookies, save the planet. I think I just wrote the bumper sticker.

I travel at every opportunity. I cherish the beauty of the open skies, the mellifluous chirping of birds, the charm and fragrance of blossoming flowers, and the giant redwoods that preside over forests like the god Zeus.

Nature is truly awesome and wonderful. Proof that the world is God’s creation, that the Book of Genesis is fact.

“’Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.’ So, God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good … And God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.’ And it was so.”

All the artistic geniuses together, including Michelangelo, Leonardo and Titian, are nothing compared with God’s transfixing handiwork.

The lyrics of “America the Beautiful” speak volumes:

O beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

Travel makes you humble. It reminds you of your insignificance and powerlessness when confronted with the elements. One look at the Rock of Gibraltar underscores your smallness, one look at Niagara Falls emphasizes your weakness, one look at the Grand Canyon evokes your awe.

Travel is necessary for recharging your batteries and reflecting on the purpose of life without the constant distractions of politics, the news cycle, traffic congestion, email or text messages. Sage and renowned U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously volunteered, “I can do 12 months’ work in 11 months, but not 12.”

Travel is a wonderful antidote to narcissism. It is dispelled the minute you are terrified by an elephant charging at you in an African jungle. You are immediately convinced that man is not the superior species.

Travel gives you a proper sense of perspective, seeing things in their proper proportions. Lord Chesterfield thus wrote to his son, “A strong mind sees things in their true proportion; a weak one views them through a magnifying medium; which, like the microscope, makes an elephant of a flea; magnifies all little objects, but cannot receive great ones.”

We are innately inclined to be tribal, parochial and fearful of anything different. Travel is a wonderful escape from that cloistered narrowness that invites enmity or strife. You quickly discover that the DNA of the species is the same everywhere irrespective of race, religion, gender, nationality or ethnicity. The same bell-shaped curve showing the distribution of virtue and vice is the same across artificial differences. Travel reminds you of the memorable words of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” which apply equally to any persecuted religion:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

To the extent people travel and experience face-to-face encounters, the world becomes more peaceful, wealthy and tolerant. It is no accident that historically cities that were international trading hubs raced forward in riches, culture, and interethnic, interracial, and interreligious amity while their more remote, isolated cohorts remained stationary. Rome, Constantinople and Antwerp were exemplary.

Candide drew the wrong lesson in traveling the world with Dr. Pangloss, observing its imperfections, and deciding to tend to his own gardens in despair. The poet John Donne drew the right lesson:

“No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.”

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.