Don't let anyone tell you otherwise: first and foremost, I'm a Marylander. Of course, Maryland is a rather diverse place, from Ocean City's hospitality and vacation industry to the mountains of Western Maryland, from the Mason-Dixon Line to the southern side where the Potomac tidewaters merge with the Chesapeake Bay. I can't claim to have lived all over Maryland, but I've been to most parts of it. Since I was six years old, other than when I've travelled around the country to live and work elsewhere for a year or two at a time, I have lived in Aspen Hill, Maryland.
Like any decent Marylander, I'm concerned for the health of the Chesapeake Bay and the tidewaters which together were once one of the most productive fisheries in the world. If for no other reason, should the voters send me to Annapolis, I'll have to smell the breezes blowing off of the Bay and I personally want to smell the clean salty smell of a healthy marine ecosystem. I want to be able to eat of plentiful Bay shellfish without the slightest fear of contamination by industrial chemicals or insecticides or mercury, and I am sure most of my fellow Marylanders feel very much the same. I want to be able to go boating and fishing without worrying about pfisteria piscicida, and I am sure that my fellow Marylanders would like to do the same, and have there be plenty of fish to catch. I want to promote even greater involvement by both the people and the State of Maryland in restoring the Chesapeake to its former health and bounty.
Maryland is one of the most urbanized of the several States, and perhaps with the most developed infrastructure in terms of highways and hydrological management. We're already one of the national leaders in terms of stewardship of our marine and river resources, but we can do better. We're generally very friendly towards the environment and concerned about the ecology but there is always room for improvement. I will always support more efficient recycling and I also call for more State support for implimentation of novel approaches to improving recycling, especially if it can help with other aspects of eco-friendliness. For example, the poultry industry generates a huge amount of droppings. There are processes which could be used to ferment these into products which are commercially useful in industry, while generating enough heat to reduce energy costs for the poultry farmers, lessening the total demand on energy and making that much more energy available to the rest of us. Also, this makes the poultry wastes more easily kept from overloading the local environment and this helps preserve the health of the Bay. I propose that the State should find or make ways to give incentives to the poultry business so that they'd adopt this technology, to everyone's profit. That profit could come in the form of improved health for the Bay and decreased costs for the poultry industry.
Crime and Violence are also major concerns of mine, as they are the concerns of most Marylanders. I very much support the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention's "CSAFE" program. This "Collaborative Supervision and Focused Enforcement" program expands supervision of people on parole or probation and provides additional funding to local police departments and related anti-crime agencies. It also provides some grants to community activism groups. It's fairly effective in a lot of ways. I have been involved for four years with this program -- which once was the "Hot Spots" program under the Glendenning/Townsend administration -- and mostly I have been involved with the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative "community policing" workgroup in Aspen Hill's troubled "North Gate Park" and the surrounding neighborhoods. We promote summer programs and after-school programs and we have a particular focus on keeping kids away from gangs and in suppressing the gangs themselves.
I will always support a two-pronged approach to crime prevention. First, we must take a long-term approach to providing an environment which provides every child with a good education that includes an emphasis on critical thinking and which develops independence along with an ability to cooperate and be civil and respectful of whatever deserves respect. I believe that character counts, and I support any educational program that builds character; we will get better citizens out of it. But a long-term approach which produces fine citizens only twenty years from now, that will not help with the crime and violence that we have with us in the here-and-now. For our present problems, I support the law-enforcement community and especially wish to give additional funding to programs which improve the public's trust and willingness to cooperate with law-enforcement, and which improve the abilities of our law-enforcement community to continue to always be worthy of trust and cooperation.
Many Marylanders are quite concerned about public health and safety issues aside from crime and violence. In particular, there are increasing numbers of people who aren't covered by any insurance policy, and it actually costs society far less to have all of its citizens healthy than to have any of them be unwell. I propose that Maryland should develop a system whereby the citizens who are uninsured through other means should be able to resort to a State program assuring that at least they are billed only at rates comparable to those paid by people who are insured. Additionally, I think we need to take a look to assure that people who are not ill, but who are disabled, are being treated fairly in terms of employment, housing, and general access to the places and things that the rest of us take for granted.
Also, we should be concerned about the state of our public-health system. In particular, Maryland's mental healthcare system has practically fallen by the wayside in the last few years, even as the conditions of society have become more stressful. We're at war, and the economy has had major problems, jobs can be hard to find and doctors can be hard to afford. But that's no excuse for letting people lose their place in society because they can't afford therapy or their medications or any special assistance they might desperately need.
We can also make conditions seem less dangerous, by actually making the conditions more safe. I think we need to beef up Maryland's counterterrorism and counterinsurgency capabilities. We can do that in many ways, from promoting more funding for special teams in all levels of State-funded law-enforcement, through promoting incentives for the counties and towns to deliver training to the citizens to be emergency assistance volunteers who can be effective in a time of crisis. I want to recommend one such program, Montgomery County's Community Emergency Response Team, or "Montgomery CERT".
Back to schools: as we move into the future, our schools will have to better prepare our children for the future in which they will live. The future is likely to be a very complex place and the complexities will very rapidly, and very frequently, change. We need to focus on the fundamentals, first, and those fundamentals include a full and deep literacy, as much as possible and as early as possible. Math and science will be essential to functioning in the world, much less being successful in it, and so I propose more funding for math and science and more stringent requirements than any Federal standards of math and science performance. But we cannot forget that a civilization without the arts and humanities ceases to be a culture and becomes more of a mere institution, and a cold and grey unattractive institution at that. It's possible to foster culture and also produce competitive graduates, and I will always be looking for innovative ways to do both, and those would be the programs I'll support for the public.
I'll also insist that all of the children in any of our schools are taught to understand history, especially the history of the United States and of Maryland, and to understand the workings of their public institutions. I'll also promote any program that not only develops character and civility, but also builds leadership. I hope to promote programs that produce citizens who won't just fight and win for the American flag, but who will do so because they love, respect, and most-importantly, understand the Republic for which it stands.