Nullius in verba
You probably saw that the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority (ABCWUA) released its new 100-year plan called WATER 2120: Securing Our Water Future. It came to most of us in the form of a four-page flier full of amorphous high hopes and a few generically good ideas. The flier’s headline reads “Water for the […]
Getting tough on crime. It’s an election promise not unlike a city councilor running on a platform of whipping inflation. Both promises are hollow. One promises to do something that no one person can do. The other implies results that most likely will never materialize. In the 1940s and early 1950s inflation in the United […]
In the hot, chaotic world of global climate change would Mexico and the Mexican Red Cross be the hope-of-last-resort for New Mexicans caught in a thousand-year drought or a Harvey-like episode of monstrous monsoonal flooding when the Republican Congress and the White House would not? That’s not a joke question. While the White House praised […]
What do you do with a tangled, embroiling week like this? Endless war in Afghanistan announced with platitudes, fanfare and no information; an assault on National Monuments and National Parks; in Phoenix a double down double talk by the President on white supremacy, “dishonest media,” “the wall” and shutting down the government if it isn’t […]
In the Jim Crow South of the ’50s and ’60s, one of the traditional compliments of the white upper class, I’ve been told, was to say with nodding approval “that’s mighty white of ya.” That phrase has become a sort of sick joke for those who have fled the haunted culture of segregation that still […]
Why should someone like me, an old man in Albuquerque, New Mexico, think he should be writing something about the ludicrous and monstrous possibility of imminent nuclear war with North Korea? And why am I finding an association between such madness and the fact of climate change denial? Other than my horror at the thought […]
It’s sad when you have to look to cities other than your own to find inspiration about life and death humanitarian issues that demand a principled and steadfast response from all people of conscience. Such an issue is President Trump’s proposed “wall” on the border between the United States and Mexico. Maybe leaders in New […]