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 […]
Columns
“Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall”
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 […]
Attacking Higher Education: A Further Descent Into the American Dark Ages
Around the same time President Trump’s U.S. Department of Justice announced that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not, in its view, protect LGBT workers from on-the-job discrimination, just as the President himself was trying to ban transgender warriors from the military, the prejudice and oppressive ignorance of this new Republican Dark Age became […]
Albuquerque’s Mayoral Election: Voting in the Dark, As Usual
The city elections in Albuquerque this October might seem to some like a tedious distraction from the gripping horror show playing out on the stage of national politics this year. But the sink hole of Radical Trumpism is widening and threatens to swallow the country up. That threat gives local political culture in America a […]
2018 Gubernatorial Election: Life and Death for New Mexico
The 2018 New Mexico gubernatorial election has every chance of being a turning point referendum on the future of our state. Will we elect a powerful and outspoken Tea Party extremist, Trumpian apologist, and climate change denier who will promise prosperity if we drink the poisoned Kool-Aid of dismantling the EPA, keep our economy running […]
How Does a Corroded Democracy, Like Ours, Get Cleaned Up and Working Properly Again?
In the slave-state of ancient Athens if you were an enfranchised free male (but not a woman, foreigner, or slave) and didn’t participate in the democratic process you were called an idiot. If you didn’t want to go to the Assembly where self-governing decisions were made by direct, simple majority vote, something like a sergeant-at-arms […]
Will We Wake One Morning and Find Our World Has Become What We’ve Most Deeply Feared?
Even though we witness major historical transitions building like thunderheads on the horizon, we can never actually see them for what they are until the storm of change has come and gone. This year, 2017, feels like something deep and fundamental is overthrowing the predictable world as we know it. And it is both gloomy […]