Washington state

It’s 2009 again, or feels like it. The protesters then were inveighing against Obamacare; the protesters now are striking out against the coronavirus lockdowns.

Fifty-five years after Martin Luther King Jr. told us justice was coming soon, we are trapped in a revolving-door nightmare where every exit leads back to more of the same: a litany of unarmed African Americans killed by police acting under color of authority.

We are better than this. Those were the words going through my head this Memorial Day weekend, as the country honored its military dead, but failed to honor the nearly 100,000 souls who perished from COVID-19.

One is a politician so obsessed with a morning cable news show that he has sought retribution by repeatedly defaming a dead woman’s memory. The other is a soft-spoken Air Force engineer who has worked on projects for 32 years with the singular goal of protecting and defending the United States.

Waiting for a legislative special session is kind of like expecting rain in Washington state. The outcome is inevitable, but we can’t be certain of when.

For one brief, shining moment – well, it wasn’t Camelot, but in Washington state in 2014 – there was a break in the decadelong control of the state Senate by the Democrats.

For many of the citizens of Washington’s 4th Legislative District, the hour before this year’s candidate filing deadline may have felt like any other Friday afternoon. For the candidates who are hoping to represent these citizens, however, a shell game of strategic filings was playing out.

In light of Gov. Jay Inslee’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order, families are spending more time in their homes. This strategy helps reduce the virus’s toll on our state, but it can also increase the risk of opioid misuse.

I walked between cots checking to make sure that no one had lost consciousness, or worse, since the last pass. There were hundreds of patients on cots in the open courtyard, in the radiology suite, and in every available clinic space.