Dimensionally Barrett

  Typically, when I have written about Memorial Day, it’s with a sense of melancholy and gratitude, of sorrow and thanks.  Some might say the melancholy and sorrow comes from lives lost, and the most cynical would say, “for what”? In my worst moments, I’ve certainly felt that way. But it is very much the recognition that we live in a violent world where humans have not truly been seriously committed to peace and that wars continue to be fought that comprises some - but not all - of that melancholy. It is also the recognition that there have been and are, men and women who generally feel that if the ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are to survive and flourish, however conflicted we are about how that should happen, then the country requires defense and vigilance. For that, absent proscription, we require volunteer enlistment.  After the launch of Desert Storm, I was en route to Honduras and sitting next to me on the Boston...

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo at West University and Bayou Blue Democrats joint meeting. Source, John Barrett When I came back to Houston in 2018, after living in the Boston area for many years and a year abroad in South Asia, I made sure to register to vote and happily cast my lot for Lina Hidalgo, a young woman who was ready to take on the Republican machine and the business-as-usual approach to governance in the nation’s third most populous city.  It would be a mistake to gloss over what the County has accomplished under her guidance and it is more than a little startling that upon thinking about it, her career is in many ways just beginning. Born in Colombia, Judge Hidalgo spent her youth in Peru and Mexico before her family moved to Houston when she was fifteen. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in political science in 2013. That year., Lina became a U.S. citizen.(1) She received received the Omidyar Network Postgraduate Fellowship "to work with an inter...