Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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With an upcoming legislative session around the corner, I thought I’d check in with my favorite think tank, Think New Mexico, about its plans for this year’s Roundhouse romp. In case you’re not familiar with this group, Think New Mexico is a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank that examines issues impacting New Mexicans’ lives then pushes for specific legislation to address nagging problems. Samples of its successes through the years abound: taking and keeping the state’s sales tax off food, redirecting state lottery r...
Wow. Another “existential” year. It seems they all are these days. COVID hit in 2020 and we, as a nation, argued over masks. Then 2021 brought vaccines and deeper divisions after an attempted insurrection. And this year is ending with a “tripledemic” and a stage set for a divided Congress and, probably, a more deeply divided nation. It must have been a couple of years ago when “existential crisis” became staple mainstream media language. Now it’s almost cliché, even if it is justified in its use — between a changing climate...
Every year about this time I get to be Santa’s editor helper. I clean up letters that children in Santa Rosa, Vaughn and Anton Chico write to him, for publication in my newspaper’s Letters to Santa special section, which is a big deal around here. Actually, I do very little editing, because a misspelled word here and there is somehow “cute” when a kid does it. More than anything, I format their letters for the purpose of “flow” and “readability,” which is something a paginator understands and readers appreciate even...
Ever wonder how other nations view us? For New Mexicans, the first thing a foreigner might think is that we’re a part of our neighbor to the south. If they knew Billy the Kid became famous as a Wild West outlaw here, then maybe they’d know we’re a bonafide state in the good ol’ USA, but as most traveling New Mexicans already know, U.S. citizens don’t even know that. Personally, I once had a man in Memphis, Tenn., when he saw me wearing a New Mexico T-shirt, engage me in a conversation about illegal immigration until I e...
Every time I go back to my home country, I pine for the good old days of my youth. I was born in Ozark, Ark., where the Arkansas River Valley meets the Ozark Mountains, and graduated high school upstream in Fort Smith. In between, I also grew up in other small Arkansas cities and towns, as the son of an itinerant minister. In the mid-1970s, I left Arkansas, and started bouncing around, mostly between Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas. By the 1980s, I “settled down” in my native state, back to be close to family, and started a...
The other day I heard a program on NPR discussing how children and youth are taking in the threat of climate change. One teenager spoke of how he became keenly aware of the threat when he had to leave his home as he viewed an approaching wildfire just outside his window. He’s an example of someone who recognizes the threat because he’s had a glimpse of it up close and personally. Other children and youth see it from a distance, like a cloud choking off their future. Anger and depression grow from such a dark view of wha...
If you ask me, Thanksgiving is better than Christmas, for a whole host of practical, spiritual and personal reasons. For one thing, it hasn’t been commercialized the way the Yuletide has. Black Friday and Cyber Monday may fall near Thanksgiving, but those shopping-spree days are in preparation for the giving and getting of Christmas. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is a feast for the body and soul. Sure, it may be based on a misleading narrative in American history, but at its core Thanksgiving is about something much b...
Did America’s fever just break? Last week’s general election provided strong evidence that democracy remains strong in our nation, as just about all those who lost their respective elections admitted defeat, with some even graciously conceding to their opponent. If only for a moment, the political rhetoric has cooled. That’s typical of all our post-election cycles. Hyperbole, smears, fearmongering and us-against-them mantras all reach their peak in the height of a campaign season, followed by a more conciliatory mood in th...
Sometimes I feel like an optimist in search of a reason to still feel that way. I want to believe in what’s good about this world, but writing about the issues of our time can be depressing. I’m penning this column in advance of this year’s general election results, so I don’t know who won and who lost. I’ve already written about my frustrations with this election cycle, including all the fears that have been espoused on both sides of the political divide, so even if I were to spin some optimism into the mix, you wouldn’t...
All year long, I’ve had a hard time getting excited about this election year. I’m just not into it this time around. This isn’t normal for me. For decades, I’ve told people that “politics is my favorite sport.” I liked the debates, the give and take, I even loved to hate the campaign commercials. But this time around, there’s just no fun in it for me. Maybe it’s the lack of a newsroom. After decades of newspapering at larger dailies with good-size newsrooms, going through an election cycle at my small weekly is a bit lonely...
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...
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 al...
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 livi...
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 elec...
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 Me...
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...
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...
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. “Ne...
Editor’s note: Tom McDonald is taking some time off. This column was first published in December 2015. You know what they say: What goes around comes around. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if that ain’t true. I’ve picked up a lot of old sayings through the years, and the older I get the more I recite them. At least I quote the ones I’ve come to believe in. There’s art in such expressions, the “pearls of wisdom,” we collect. Sometimes they make a subtle point without exactly saying it, other time...
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 f...
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 co...
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...
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 2021-22, an impressive leap from $626.5 million in FY 2020-21, and eclipsing the...
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 af...
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 towar...
