Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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A lot of people are comparing 2020 to 1968 these days, and for good reason. This year is at least as tumultuous as ’68, and we’re only halfway through it. Generationally, 1968 was beset with Baby Boomers who opposed the Vietnam War and sympathized with the Black Power movement of that time. Now, in 2020 we’ve got Generation Z and Millennials expressing their outrage over America’s failing institutions, with a growing intolerance for that which keeps African-Americans and other minorities down. It’s ironic that the boomers and...
For my pro-Trump friends and acquaintances, this column is for you. I want to appeal to your better nature. I know some intelligent people who support Trump. They like what he’s accomplished, even if they sometimes cringe at his boorish behavior. They like his pro-gun, anti-abortion, business-friendly position on things, and they love the fact that he’s packing the judicial system with conservative judges. OK, I get it. You like what he’s done for the issues you care most about. Maybe I’d feel the same way with a boorish...
The outrage is growing, and for good reason. It was a week straight out of hell. When the national death toll from the coronavirus topped 100,000, you’d think that would have captured our undivided attention. Instead, one death in Minneapolis took the headlines. It happened on Memorial Day, when yet another black man was killed by police — only this time it was a brutally slow death, caught on video by a bystander and leading to outrage all across the nation. The video of George Floyd’s death shows the world how he was kille...
The defining national/international event for the infamous baby boomer generation was the Vietnam War. It was America’s longest war at the time, with combat fueled by soldier boys ages 18 and up. About 58,000 Americans died over our eight-year involvement in that war, but as terrible a death toll as that was, it has been eclipsed in less than three months by the COVID-19 pandemic. The outbreak has taken more than 100,000 American lives and climbing — and it’s hitting the boomers (as well as the “silent generation” whose def...
It’s been said that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. The future is always an uncertainty, but it’s especially acute for this year’s graduating classes. Not only did the pomp and ceremony surrounding their milestone accomplishments get nixed by the coronavirus pandemic, but what lies ahead is more of a mystery than a plan. As of last weekend, New Mexicans started opening their doors just a crack, to gauge the temperature of our collective illness in the hope that we’re over the worst of it. We’re not, but...
Chris Mathys is basically a fringe candidate in the Second Congressional District of New Mexico, as if there’s such a thing as a fringe candidate in Donald Trump’s Republican Party. It’s almost laughable how Mathys and his party opposition — Yvette Herrell and Claire Chase — are all trying to out-Trump each other. Herrell and Chase are accusing each other of Trump disloyalty even before the man took ownership of their party, but Mathys is using another approach. He’s suggesting that he has an ideological kinship with the pr...
When the economy started to retract from the onslaught of the coronavirus, pundits compared it to the Great Recession of 2008. Now they’re drawing a line to the Great Depression, which started with a stock market crash in the fall of 1929 and lasted through the 1930s. It was a defining moment for an entire generation, much as today’s pandemic is defining the “lost” class of high school and college seniors and their contemporaries. History has yet to be written about the long-term impact this latest crisis will have on thei...
So, how are you doing, really? I ask with the concern of a therapist. OK, I’ll leave the therapy to the professionals, but it doesn’t take a shrink to see how this pandemic is having an emotional impact on people with vastly different experiences and perspectives. I know introverts who aren’t bothered by the edict to stay at home, while at least one extrovert I know appears to be looking for excuses to get out of his house. Some people are discovering the benefits of working at home. Others are feeling the stress that comes...
History doesn’t repeat itself, someone once said, but it often rhymes. There have been plenty of comparisons lately between our modern-day predicament and the Spanish flu of 1918-1920, and for good reason. If we can learn from that historic pandemic, maybe we can avoid making some of the same mistakes. Of course, the circumstances are very different now — and that’s to our advantage. In 1918, a killer influenza virus hit in the middle of World War I, a terrible conflict that raged between 1914 and 1918 and killed an estim...
If you’re at home listening to the national hyperbole, you might think the nation is closed down. It isn’t. Just take a look at the list of “essential” services here in New Mexico, the ones allowed to remain open during these “stay at home” times. There’s a long list of businesses, agencies and governmental operations that are allowed and encouraged to stay open. Basically, those businesses offering up the luxuries of our lives are the only ones forced to close. If no one has to have it for their health, safety or welfare, i...
As we attempt to face this coronavirus crisis collectively, we're handicapped by a loss of trust in our institutions. Many if not most Americans no longer believe in our government, our leaders, the media, our churches, science and even our charitable causes and democratic processes. These days they're all tainted, sometimes by harsh realities and facts, other times by accepted falsehoods and exaggerations. See how many of these statements you agree with: Our Congress places party politics over the national interest. The pres...
By the time President Trump declared a national emergency on March 13, nearly half the nation’s governors had already declared health emergencies of their own. The states, not the federal government, have been leading the battle against COVID-19. In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham declared a health emergency on March 11, and since then, our state’s effort to contain the spread of this new disease has come out of Santa Fe. It started with cancellations of everything that draws a crowd and, within a week, extended to...
Last week was one for the history books. On March 10, Joe Biden became the Democratic Party’s heir apparent with his big win in Michigan. The textbooks haven’t been written yet, but I think it’s safe to say it will go down in history as the primary election that put him over the top. He won every county in Michigan, a state that went for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and Donald Trump in the general election. It’s hard to see how Biden could lose his party’s nomination now. Then, last Wednesday, Harvey Weinstein...
The governor gives and the governor takes away. For transparency advocates at least, that’s what it felt like last week when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law two bills related to government transparency. Let’s start with Senate Bill 64, which reverses a practice used under Gov. Susana Martinez’s administration that tucks away for six months public inspection of settlements in damage claims against state agencies. By signing SB64 into law, Lujan Grisham made such settlements immediately accessible to the public, mea...
This nation has been urbanizing since its beginnings, ever since the first industrial revolution started creating jobs in the cities. For centuries now, country folk have been moving to the city in search of something better than the subsistence existence of their rural roots. But city life isn’t necessarily a better life, so some have returned to the country — satisfied, I suppose, that they’ve seen enough of the world to know where they belong. Then there’s that in-between land, where small towns and cities give their r...
Seems like everybody else saw it coming, but not me. Since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham had appointed a big-deal of a task force to consider all the angles, and since a super-majority of the state’s citizenry favors it, and since there’s so much money to be made on it, I figured it would sail through even a short legislative session. But I was wrong. Turns out lawmakers weren’t ready to pull the trigger. Who would’ve thought legalizing recreational marijuana in New Mexico would be so difficult? This is the second session...
Last week’s arrival of SpaceShipTwo at New Mexico’s Spaceport America signaled a big step forward in the “Space Valley” the governor is touting and the “Space Trail” we’ve had all along. With the spacecraft’s move from the Mojave Desert in California to New Mexico’s spaceport between Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces, Virgin Galactic is positioning itself for one final round of test flights before launching commercial passenger flights into space — and placing New Mexico, once again, on the cutting edge of space explo...
“There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.” — Pythagoras Between the impeachment in D.C., and the debacle in Iowa and the gun-toting protesters in Santa Fe, politics is on overkill. I don’t know about you but I could use a break — so let us escape from the tones of our discontent to the tunes of our better selves. Several years ago on a visit to El Paso, I decided to cross the border into Mexico, back when it could be done without a passport or papers and was an easy stroll...
I’m mostly busy running my own newspaper these days, but I still have a weekly news service on the side. More than six years ago, I named it the Community News Exchange (CNEx) and have been running it ever since. These days, I mostly leave it in the capable hands of Linda Quintana to download and typeset, edit, arrange and transmit content to subscriber newspapers around the state. We distribute hard and soft news, features, photos and opinion pieces — and every now and then Linda takes off and I’m left to do the weeke...
In 1970, President Richard Nixon invited Johnny Cash to the White House. Nixon asked the country music star to sing “Welfare Cadillac,” a parody about a shiftless man who took his government checks to buy a luxurious car, and “Okie from Muskogee,” an anti-hippie anthem of that time. Instead, Cash sang a protest song he’d written, with a chorus that goes: “And the lonely voice of youth cries, ‘What is truth?’” Vietnam was raging as “Nixon’s war” while the phrase “generation gap” had been coined to describe a deep national di...
Buried beneath the hyper-political year we’re about to have is something else that will shape our future. It’s time once again for a U.S. Census count. The U.S. Constitution requires a count every 10 years. More than a simple headcount, all sorts of demographic information is collected. And while the population counts are used to redraw the U.S. House of Representatives district lines every 10 years, other Census data are used in divvying up billions in federal dollars among the nation’s counties, municipalities and state...
Here we are again, about to enter into the abyss of a 30-day legislative session. It’ll be one of the fun ones, when lawmakers will get to spend-spend-spend. It must be refreshing for legislators who, not so long ago, had to cut-cut-cut their way through hard times and a tax-averse governor. Nowadays, state coffers are flush with oil and gas revenues and there’s enough money for increases everywhere, to state agencies all over the place. In a press release from the governor’s office last week, a $7.68 billion budget propo...
If you’re interested in seeing how this nation is changing, look to the states. If you look to Washington D.C., you’ll only find deterioration. With the start of the new year, a lot of changes came through new state laws — with New Mexico in the thick of it all. On Jan. 1, Illinois became the 11th state to legalize recreational marijuana, and it looks like a race to see who will become the 12th. According to Newsweek, governors in six states where recreational pot is still outlawed support legalization — including our own Gov...
It’ll begin very soon, with state caucuses and primaries starting in Iowa and New Hampshire, and impeachment roaring out of the nation’s capital, all in January. The biggest monkey wrench to be thrown into the crossover between the 2019 posturing and the 2020 reality checking, in my opinion, wasn’t the articles of impeachment — we’ve known that was coming for months now, and still don’t know how it will affect the election. Instead, I think it came as a crack in President Trump’s armor, in the form of an editorial cal...
Let’s take a look at some of the political and governmental happenings this year in New Mexico and where they might go in 2020. This year started out with one of the most significant legislative sessions in years, thanks to a 2018 tsunami that flooded the state with a Democratic Party super-majority. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham rode a wave of support into the governor’s job, and state government took a hard left turn, leaving the Susana Martinez years in the rearview mirror. In a 60-day session, lawmakers ran roughshod ove...
