Ordinary People

Gov. Martin O'Malley's gas and other tax proposals show he has lost touch with ordinary Marylanders. The governor lives in a privileged world where his children are chauffeured to private school in Baltimore while he travels around the country raising money for the Democratic Party. How does he understand how expensive it is to drive to work or live on a pension based on your own savings? Marylanders do not need more taxes, especially the gas tax increase which will cause food prices to rise for everyone.

The Orioles have been losers the last 14 years. They'll crash any day, you say. They have a lot more winning to do before you'll buy a ticket and cheer for them. But do you remember the last time you tried to change your losing ways? Bet it wasn't easy to break a habit. This year the O's are magical and fearless. As the classic underdog, they are a formidable force for justice for the little and forgotten people. They win games that confound the most knowledgeable baseball fan. Players with minuscule batting averages hit home runs.

MOST of us associate Thurgood Marshall with the long struggle for rights for African-Americans -- with his two decades of leadership in the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, his victories against restrictive covenants in housing and school segregation, especially his great victory of advocacy in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. But it is a mistake to think of him, on or off the Supreme Court, in such a narrow framework.Marshall's focus has always been far more inclusive than African-Americans.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's gas and other tax proposals show he has lost touch with ordinary Marylanders. The governor lives in a privileged world where his children are chauffeured to private school in Baltimore while he travels around the country raising money for the Democratic Party. How does he understand how expensive it is to drive to work or live on a pension based on your own savings? Marylanders do not need more taxes, especially the gas tax increase which will cause food prices to rise for everyone.

A nasty debate has erupted over how American history should be taught.A committee of educators has developed new guidelines that would focus more on the lives of ordinary people and minority groups than on famous individuals.One of the directors of the project complains that the traditional way of teaching history is "very top heavy . . . hero driven . . . the only history makers are the select few; the generals and the great politicians and the few inventors and scientists and so forth."By teaching about ordinary people, he says, the students might see "themselves as history makers . . ."

STRAINS OF THE old protest songs kept going through my head last week as I walked through the Smithsonian's new photo exhibit on the civil rights era.The show, titled simply "We Shall Overcome," is on view through Feb. 8 at the National Museum of American History in Washington.It documents a time not too long ago when segregation was the law and those who opposed it -- black and white -- literally risked their lives to awaken the conscience of a nation.By coincidence, on my return to Baltimore I was greeted by reports that the Maryland Ku Klux Klan planned to march in Annapolis Feb. 7 to protest the observance of Black History Month.

FINDING YOUR calling can be a major key to happiness, according to Eldersburg author Deborah Dasch.Dasch is the author of a new book, "Find Your Calling, Love Your Life -- Paths to Your Truest Self in Life and Work," published this month by Simon and Schuster."

Political terrorists are rarely able to bring large populations to a state of general panic, to the utter fear that makes them acquiesce to desperate, democracy-destroying measures.Ordinary people are usually tougher than terrorists think.What terrorists succeed at is to create individual human tragedies, and the kind of sadness among survivors that never goes away. What terrorists engender is hot fury that melts down into deep anger.Eventually, when it is finally understood that everything that can be done against the terrorists is being done, a kind of bitter indifference to them settles in.But first comes the anger.

The North Carroll Drama Club is undertaking a serious challenge.The students will present their fall production of Judith Guest's "Ordinary People" at 8 p.m. today and tomorrow.The play's action focuses on Conrad Jarrett, a teen-ager so distraught over the death of his older brother, Buck, that he attempts suicide.The movie version, starring Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore, was released in 1980.The play is emotionally demanding for the nine student actors."Ms. Rooney [the drama teacher]

WASHINGTON - From setting federal standards for driver's licenses to requiring air passengers to pass through elaborate bomb-detection machines, the report of the Sept. 11 commission contains more than a dozen recommendations that would significantly affect the daily lives of ordinary people. The measures - separate from the commission's more publicized call for restructuring the intelligence community - could cost billions and spark strong debate as lawmakers hasten to respond to the panel's scathing critique of U.S. security.

For some the world of philanthropy has seemed the domain of the moneyed few, a luxury for "the other half." But a growing development in that arena has taken hold, opening philanthropy up to the masses in a user-friendly way: giving circles. A giving circle is a group of people who gather together to pool money for a common cause. Like a miniature, informal foundation of sorts, the group members manage the fund and determine how their collections will be spent. A 2006 study by the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers found that giving circles around the country are having a major impact, not just in terms of the money they give to organizations and causes, but by the ways their donors benefit from the experience.

John Legend is betting his career on the public's escalating disgust. "Millions of people hate what's on the radio right now," he says. "I also hate what's on the radio right now. So I've put my bet on being different." His new single couldn't be more so. "Save Room" oozes with vintage lounge soulfulness, suggesting something sung by Tom Jones in 1968. In fact, Legend swiped the song's surging organ hook from "Stormy," a hit by the Classics IV that dates back to the Nixon administration.

LONDON -- One was a well-known student activist at London Metropolitan University whom a friend described as a moderate. Another worked in security at Heathrow airport. Another had a job in a pizza parlor. The youngest of the alleged plotters was only 17. They lived seemingly ordinary lives on ordinary streets in the immigrant neighborhoods of London, Birmingham and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Friends and neighbors could have no idea they were planning murder on a mass scale. But little more than a month after Britain marked the first anniversary of the July 7 suicide attacks that killed 52 London commuters, the nation was slowly coming to grips with reports that another, even more ambitious network had taken root in their midst.

In the painting, a young African-American boy, dressed in blue jeans and bright red cap, gazes out thoughtfully at the viewer. Look closely, and his eyes seem to gleam with intelligence and determination. "It's like flipping the pages of a family album," says historian David Terry. The artwork, created by Maryland artist Joseph Holston, is on display at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in a section of the permanent exhibition devoted to black achievement in the arts.

Horrifying stories about the rapes and murders of children and about judges who go easy on sex offenders who prey on the young have prompted some state legislatures to tighten the laws and restrict the sentencing discretion of judges. Few in the media or among the intelligentsia have been as outraged about these sadistic crimes against children as they have been about whether terrorists' phone calls have been intercepted. Part of this is politics, but part of it is the continuation of a tradition that goes back more than two centuries - de-emphasizing the punishment of criminals.

Perhaps the best aspect of Paradise Now is its lack of ambition. If this film about two would-be Palestinian suicide bombers had tried to be the last word on why people resort to this tactic, it probably would have come off as a didactic exercise in overwrought tedium. Instead, director and co-writer Hany Abu-Assad settled for using this provocative theme as the central element in a rather straightforward adventure story. Certainly it has its teaching moments - and these are the ones that slow it to a crawl - but for the most part, Paradise Now maintains a rather brisk pace, keeping you wondering what's going to happen next more effectively than a lot of high-budget features.

Colonial Players' current production of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful offers theatergoers bounteous rewards. The cast's interaction in portraying ordinary people confronting real-life situations is so convincing that the audience should be accused of eavesdropping. Marking his 18th directing assignment, Colonial Players director Rick Wade has reached a peak with this production in terms of the brilliant cast he has assembled, the honesty portrayed and the seamless unveiling of the plot.

During the 1940s, photographer Arthur Leipzig produced hundreds of pictures documenting the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Now 70 of the artist's images have been gathered in On Assignment, an exhibition at the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Leipzig, now 85, explored an astonishing variety of subjects. His photo essays have ranged from children, rural laborers, winter fishing in the Atlantic and cellist Pablo Casals to southern Sudan, Mexico, pediatric hospitals and Jewish life.

John Michael Montias, 76, an economist who became a leading scholar on the painter Johannes Vermeer, died of cancer July 26 in Branford, Conn. Part of the Annales School of economists and historians, he was among those who promoted a new form of history by replacing study of major leaders and events with microstudy of ordinary people and occurrences. Through analysis of documents ranging from notes to legal papers, he explored the life of Vermeer, one of his favorite artists.

THE FRENCH are fed up. The world has been changing fast, and not in a way that thrills everyone living in it. To take just one example, the forces that shut down the GM plant on Broening Highway are battering - or will be battering - at the gates of the Renault factory in Le Mans. Everybody knows that, and though most people know that change is bound to occur, the uneasiness in France (and in Europe and in the rest of the developed world) is deeply rooted in the feeling that ordinary people (call them voters)