Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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As an observer of human nature and the body politick, I’ve reached the conclusion that the meanspirited attacks on both sides are largely due to the extremes. But there’s a more moderate middle that sees a third way, one that’s closer to our collective nature and articulated well by the pundit David Brooks. Longtime journalist Brooks is what I’d describe as a moderate conservative. He writes a column for the New York Times and gives analysis on PBS News Hour, but he’s more of a free thinker than a partisan political commentator. Search fo...
This is altogether anecdotal, so I won’t pretend it’s based on scientific observation, but I’ve noticed something in my annual trips to Arkansas for a Thanksgiving get-together in the Ozark Mountains. The autumn leaves seem to be peaking earlier. October is the best time to see a brilliant display of colors in the Ozark Plateau. It’s as if God painted the mountains just for our viewing pleasure. But by the end of November, when I take my trip, the fiery splash of the red, orange, yellow and green broadleaf colors have all but disappe...
Maybe you’ve read my brother Don’s column, something I run weekly in my Guadalupe County News because, well, he loaned me money. That’s why we call his weekly column “The One Percenter,” because that’s about how much of my newspaper he “owns,” although we are now locked in a pitched battle over an additional 1%, which he thinks he has earned by bringing in “at least a million” readers, a figure he arrived at using a mathematical formula he made up. Who says numbers don’t lie? Fortunately, my brother doesn’t make his living off math. He’s a...
If you ask me, a big reason why democracy in America is in trouble is because of the way we’ve set it up. First, there’s our Electoral College for electing presidents. By using state electors for selecting the overall winner through an antiquated Electoral College, instead of the majority of all voters, a lot of votes end up not mattering. For example, if you’ve been a Trump supporter in New Mexico, your vote for president in 2020 didn’t count toward the final tally that gave Biden the election. All of this state’s five electoral votes wen...
The other day, I heard a pundit call New Mexico “purple,” as in a balanced mix of “blue” Democrats and “red” Republicans. If that’s the case, we must have some closeted Republicans holding office, because these days the Democrats control the political landscape. Republicans, however, aren’t that far removed from power. Not only do they control some conservative areas around New Mexico, it was only four years ago when a Republican was governor, so maybe a little purple is part of the equation after all. The fact is, New Mexico is a unique sta...
In case you haven’t noticed, nuclear power is back in the headlines these days. Even here in New Mexico, where there are no nuclear power plants, it’s an issue. Not only do we have the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), where radioactive waste is stored deep underground in the southeastern corner of the state, federal regulators are considering another facility that would store up to 100,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive nuclear waste, which would be transported in from nuclear reactors around the nation. This one is called a “Co...
The governor is leading in her bid for re-election, as are other Democrats running statewide races. New Mexicans see crime and inflation as the biggest issues facing the state, and they want judges to have more authority to keep violent crime suspects in jail. They also want more gun control, not less, and believe abortion should be legal in New Mexico with certain restrictions. That and more can be gleaned from the latest polling done by Research & Polling Inc. from the Albuquerque Journal. Any surprises there? Certainly not for me, but it...
In the Great American Culture Wars of our time, two different worldviews, science and religion, continue to do battle, even though it doesn’t have to be that way. Science has reshaped our world in incredible ways. Digital technologies have come to dictate how we live our lives. Medical advancements are saving people from diseases and deformities that once killed off people by the thousands. And mathematics has turned our economy into a numbers game that doesn’t even require actual productivity to build wealth. “Necessity is the mother of inven...
Heroes are easy to find but hard to keep. Especially when we’re young, we need our heroes, or positive role models if you prefer, as examples of what courage, sacrifice and success are all about. We typically start with our parents, superheroes in our young eyes, while our imaginations gravitate toward mythical beings like the Man of Steel, the Dark Knight or, yes, that proverbial cowboy riding through a time when right was right and wrong was wrong and what you did, not what you said, was who you were. Parents and action figures are just t...
I found inspiration at a burn scar recently. It was in California, which has been burning for years now as Exhibit A for the onset of climate change. I had driven into the state to pick up my daughter Maya at LAX, after she had traveled back in time (thanks to the international date line) from Japan to the U.S. After embracing in the same space-time continuum, we spent a few hours under the smog of Los Angeles, then made our way into Sequoia National Forest, where some of the biggest trees on earth stand. This is not to be confused with another...
Downsizing for an old-school media junkie involves lots of newspapers and magazines, the hardcopy kind, where the first draft of history was laid out for all the world to consume through linear reading. I’ve got an intimidating number of newspapers laying around my house; almost as many as I’ve got laying around my newspaper office. So I opted for an easier path, though still daunting, by jumping into the boxes of magazines I’ve kept in storage all these years. I suppose I was waiting for the day when historians, or at least my kids, would...
The Governor’s Office recently boasted of record-setting in-state spending from the filmmaking industry. And while a good chunk of that is going into the Rio Grande Corridor, where Netflix and other filmmakers have set up shop, smaller cities and towns are benefiting as well. According to state figures, the film, television and digital media production industry pumped $855.4 million in “direct spending” into the New Mexico economy in fiscal year 2020-21, an impressive leap from $626.5 million in FY 2020-21, and eclipsing the $292 million spent...
Now that a 27-year-old man’s confession has substantiated a doctor’s story that a 10-year-old girl was raped, got pregnant and had to go out of state to get an abortion, you’d have a heart of stone not to feel for the girl. And if you insist that she should carry her pregnancy full term, you’re more than heartless, you’re being cruel. I say this because it sickens me when children are victimized as this young girl has been, first by a man who reportedly raped her at least twice, then by an Ohio law that prohibits abortions after six weeks. Cons...
New Mexico’s been making the national news a lot lately, and not the good kind. First came the wildfires. The Hermits Peak Fire was making national headlines even before it merged with the Calf Canyon Fire and became the biggest fire in state history. Before that there was the McBride Fire that ripped through a residential woodland at Ruidoso, killing two people, and since then we’ve seen the Black Fire in the Gilas grow into the state’s second largest fire ever. As of this writing, the nation has turned its attention toward the Washburn Fire...
It’s being declared often these days. There’s even a book pushing the notion in its title: “America is a Christian nation.” To which I ask: Which Christian? Which version of Christianity are we talking about, the conservative Christian nationalists or the liberal Christian internationalists? They may share the “Christian” moniker, but they are, in reality, two separate religions. In some Christian churches, there’s a civil war going on. New Mexico’s largest Christian denomination, the Catholic church, is becoming more deeply divided each da...
Our institutions are taking a beating in the world of public opinion, and I think I know why. By institutions I mean those organizations that provide a measure of stability and security in our lives — our governing bodies, established religions, businesses and industries, news media and the internet, and other established bodies that we used to trust. There are a host of reasons why we no longer believe in them, and I’m convinced there is one root cause for our disillusionment — the lack of truth in what they tell us. I’m talking about the har...
Credit the Albuquerque Journal for launching a series on Title IX and its impact on sports, as this culture-shifting law turns 50 this year. The series is just getting started, and the Journal says it’ll be running for weeks to come. I’m looking forward to it. If you’re an educator, chances are you’re familiar with Title IX. It was signed into law just two years before I graduated high school, when women’s liberation was at full tilt and girls my age were growing up faster than guys like me. I was in high school when Title IX took effect. I mai...
We’ve been living with inflation all our lives. That’s why old folks can remember when a gallon of gas cost under a buck and bread cost about a quarter a loaf. But now it’s getting out of hand. The most recent Consumer Price Index report shows a whopping 8.6% rise in prices over the past 12 months. Prices are going up on gasoline and diesel, food and clothing, housing and household items, air travel and new and used vehicles, medical costs and recreation. Wages and salaries are also going up, but it’s not keeping up for everyone. Inflati...
We Americans like to accumulate stuff through most of our lives, then somewhere around old age we start trying to get rid of it. At least that’s true for me. I’ve been working to downsize my stuff since around my 60th birthday, and I’m still at it six years later. Right now, I’m going through a stack of boxes that contain bits and pieces of my life through the years. It’s a step back in time for me, to go through stuff that at some point I couldn’t quite let go of. I’m not a hoarder, but all those boxes suggest that, at one time or another, I c...
Fatigue seems to have set in over Americans following the latest mass shootings, and for good reason. The numbers are staggering. So far this year, we’ve had 27 school shootings, according to Education Week. Last week’s mass murder in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was the biggest since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting 10 years ago. Legislatively, nothing was done then, and most of us expect nothing to be done this time, either. At this pace, our nation will easily surpass the 34 school shootings that Education Week cou...
If you want to understand the impact that technology is having on us, consider the history of tobacco. Perhaps you know that Native Americans first introduced tobacco to Europeans, who turned it into a cash crop of great importance to the English colonies along the east coast of what we now call the United States. Europe was their first international market, with tobacco touted for its medicinal benefits. But it was a labor-intensive crop that became far more profitable when slaves were brought in to grow, harvest and cure it. By comparison,...
It’s that time of year, when just about every newspaper in the state gives front-page attention to at least one local graduation. They’re always a big deal, especially to those who walk across that ceremonial stage and make their families proud. Graduations mark a transition in our lives, but sometimes I think it’s over-emphasized. Anyone who thinks a diploma or degree is a ticket to success is sadly mistaken. It’s just a ticket to ride; you still have to get there on your own. But rather than continuing with a recitation of grad-day platitudes...
If Elon Musk is going to take over Twitter, I hope he reads a recent article in The Atlantic magazine by Jonathan Haidt, about the impact social media is having on our democracy and what we can do about it. Of course, the richest man in America isn’t likely to listen to a peon like me, which is why I also recommend this article to you. As Haidt points, we can’t really rely on anyone but ourselves to address this problem. Haidt is a social psychologist at the New York University School of Business. A fairly prolific author and self-described pol...
If you’re like me, you’ve gone through a range of emotional reactions to the pressing issue of climate change. For me, now that wildfires are raging throughout this Land of Enchantment, it’s getting personal. Years ago, when I first saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” I was alarmed but not overly worried. I wanted to believe that America could lead the world away from fossil fuels. As former Vice President Al Gore had pointed out in his thought-provoking documentary, it was possible to solve this existential problem as we had done with the “hole in...
One of the most uplifting things to receive, and rewarding things to give, is mentoring. It’s certainly been an important part of my career. I was in my 30s when I met my first journalism mentor. Bill Rutherford was the page-one editor for the Arkansas Gazette who taught college classes on the side when I was pursuing my undergrad degree at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He was the best kind of journalism instructor, in large part because he was living it every day. He taught me the basics of good reporting, and he set the bar h...