What's the Coolest Thing You Ever Did?

I just got home from a day of campaigning in Longmead Crossing, where my wife and I lived for a dozen or so years before moving to our current home in Kemp Mill. Some kids were waiting at a nearby bus stop. What the heck? I went over to them, and told them I'm running for Delegate. "What's that?" one of them asked, so I told them it was like being a Congressman, but you don't get on TV as much and you focus on Maryland instead of the whole country. "That's cool," another one said, and then asked: "Is it the coolest thing you ever did?" Tough question.

I thought about it and then I told them that the coolest thing I ever did was get hundreds of teens around the country to go to nearby National Guard armories, enter the communications rooms where there was incredibly sophisticated military communications equipment, and use the equipment to do distance learning science experiments with NASA astronauts circling the earth overhead in the Space Shuttle.

The coolest thing for me wasn't seeing my project get on all the nightly national TV news shows; the coolest thing was how so many of the kids told me afterwards that this was the coolest thing THEY ever did.And, in turn, that got me thinking about how much more Annapolis could do to leverage the power of distance learning to touch the lives of young people throughout our state.

On the campaign trail, sometimes the most off-beat questions yield the most self reflective candidate answers.