Las Cruces Needs MMC's Psych Ward OPEN

Must the city and county, as MMC’s landlords, sue Memorial Medical Center to make MMC keep its written promises?

MMC’s 5^th floor psych ward is an essential community resource. Many citizens need psychiatric care, and Las Cruces is woefully underserved. Some patients with urgent medical needs have mental health problems that interfere with treatment. The lease requires MMC to remain “a full-service hospital,” with a “12-bed locked psychiatric unit.”

The lease requires 30-days’ written notice before trying to close the psych ward. MMC quietly closed the psych ward last year, with no formal notice. (County Manager Fernando Macias and City Manager Ifo Pili sit on MMC’s Board.)

Recently, “Mrs. Z” was admitted with a serious medical issue but her mental health issues interfered with treatment. MMC’s psych ward was closed. Mesilla Valley Hospital could treat the mental but not the medical problem. MMC called Mrs. Z’s daughter to pick her up and drive her to Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo. Now she’s at UNM, far from everyone she knows. Because MMC has no psych ward.

“Y” is a young Las Crucen who needs “strict psychiatric regulation.” His family says the closing forced him to move to El Paso – where he was recently missing for weeks before turning up in jail.

MMC CEO John Harris says, “The decision to close this floor was not taken lightly. Provision of these services has always been based upon being able to staff this unit appropriately and safely. Once this has been achieved, we look forward to bringing these services to our community.”

What magic enables Gerald Champion to have a supervising psychiatrist, when Las Cruces is at least as appealing a place in which to live and work in? Might it have helped for MMC to advertise nationally, an obvious first step? It’s likely that in our market-driven society MMC could hire a psychiatrist if it really wanted to. Though there is a national shortage.

Critics say MMC isn’t trying. Historically, it’s been a community battle to keep the facility open. Outspoken advocate Ron Gurley and other protesters got it re-opened several years ago. Some say that if psychiatric services were more profitable, MMC would have re-opened already. Harris denies that, citing several unprofitable operations the hospital retains because they’re needed.

Harris also says restoring psychiatric care is a high priority. He hopes to have the unit opened in 2-4 months.

I hope he’s right.

If wary community members are right, MMC is willfully violating its lease. County Commission Chair Susie Chaparro says, “I don’t think we should tolerate it,” and Commissioner Shannon Reynolds is also angry about it. I urge the city council and county commission to authorize staff to write MMC so stating.

It’s troubling that our local governments have done absolutely nothing about this. It’s not for lack of information, with Pili and Macias on MMC’s board. (I’m still waiting to hear why the city can sue its own municipal court judge, on a silly claim the district court immediately tossed out, but not a zillion-dollar corporation breaching its lease.) It might prove unnecessary, but would make clear to MMC that we’re serious.

I’ll cop to some real skepticism about large corporations giving community needs and attitudes fair weight when those conflict at all with maximizing profits. I hope Lifepoint Health, which owns MMC, proves an exception, and that Spring 2023 will bring a renewal of psychiatric care.

                                                – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 29 January 2023, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both stations’ websites.]

[Sad situation, possibly tragic for some. Not much to add. Column would be less mild had I not talked to MMC CEO. Without necessarily buying the excuses for why this wasn’t either prevented or corrected sooner, I’m hopeful MMC will get the situation corrected by May, as he said it would be. I’m also hopeful that we (the community, including the press who should serve as community’s eyes, ears, and voice sometimes) and the local governments will pay more attention, tell the hard truths, and push MMC more firmly. This sort of thing is an inherent danger when you put corporations in charge of public services.  Prisons, for example.]

  [Photos © Peter Goodman]

[P.S. As I published this, I heard from a respected former city councilor, who said the column was "spot on on all fronts. MMC owes this working/competent service to our community in exchange for all of the other patients and revenue they are enjoying.

"Psychiatric services are essential medical services. It is estimated that 30% of hospital inpatients on medical and surgical units, including intensive and cardiac care, have psychiatric co-morbidities. And how many in our community are already regular users of psychotropic medications?

"Nah! MMC is phoning it in." ]

 

 

[WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM SOLOMON PEÑA?]

Solomon Peña’s story is instructive.

He’s the gent who idolizes Donald Trump, maintains similar illusions of election theft, and therefore shot up Albuquerque politicians’ homes. (No one was injured, though shots through a legislator’s daughter’s bedroom caused small fragments of the ceiling to fall on her.)

Peña’s “rigged election” claims are even sillier than Trump’s. In a largely Democratic district, Peña challenged a popular incumbent state representative.  (A judge’s ruling let Peña run despite having served seven years in prison for felonies. I doubt the publicity enhanced his stature as candidate.) Peña lost, 5,600-2,000. Amassed 26% of the vote. To create a story that would make a Republican felon competitive in such a race is beyond my imagination. His opponent needed no fraud.

A “passionate Trump supporter” who reportedly called himself “the MAGA King,” Peña illustrates the absurdity of Trump’s “stolen election” campaign.

Peña is also a poster child for Republicans’ apparent openness to political violence. It’s not just the Capitol invasion. It’s a national pattern, although the state Republican Party says Peña, if convicted, should be punished appropriately.

Ironically, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar just regained committee assignments he’d lost for producing violent cartoon videos depicting him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden. Apparently Republicans find that acceptable.

Violence is facilitated by dehumanization of potential victims. That’s what certain Republican rhetoric does, including the state party’s many mailers accusing Democratic candidates of being chummy with child molesters. After a demented Republican broke in and hit U.S. House Speaker Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband with a hammer, prominent Republicans spread a false story that the “attacker” was actually a homosexual lover. Meanwhile George Santos proves that fellow Republicans will help you get elected even if they know your resume is a complete shuck.

That these folks lie is no huge surprise. Most politicians do. (As do most of us!) That they sometimes believe particularly absurd lies, and act violently based on those, is concerning. I wonder what Republicans and other conservatives think of all this, and how they plan to continue advocating their beliefs without supporting baboons as candidates. (Apologies to any actual baboons.)

. What’s less obvious is what Peña’s mad misconduct has to say about you, and me. We may not share his love of Mr. Trump, but we are fellow human beings.

Is it far-fetched to see shades of Peña in all the little ways we all misapprehend inconvenient aspects of reality and respond by lashing out, albeit nonviolently? Too often, the human reaction to anything uncomfortable (or ego-crushing) is: life didn’t go as we wished, so we’re victims, treated unfairly. Let’s spread lies about her, or sabotage his lab data.

Sorry if I sound preachy, but life is too short to waste it living in a sour mood or hating others. Things happen, sometimes terrible things; but sometimes we victimize ourselves. Some folks would start the day complaining even in a wonderful house overlooking beautiful mountains with a lover, while some wake up smiling and would greet even their prison guards with a cheerful joke.

That doesn’t excuse Mr. Peña or erase what his conduct says about Mr. Trump. Society should probably jail both.

Still, with my advancing age, it feels too easy to stop at judging others, and more helpful, given our common humanity, to contemplate what others’ stories tell me about my own failings.

                                                                 – 30 --

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 22 January 2023, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both stations’ websites.]

[This column will seem odd to many readers: most will feel sufficiently different from Mr. Peña and Mr. Trump, and sufficiently comfortable that their perceptions are at least in the same Zip Code as reality, that they’ll agree Peña was a madman influenced by evil Republicans, but see the last paragraphs of the column as reaching; others may reject the whole suggestion that Trump is a dangerous con man and that Trump’s big fan, Peña, say anything about Trump, or that the Republican mailers mentioned were at all racist or beyond normal political jousting. To the former, I’d say, “So I’m flaky. Take it for what it’s worth.” To the latter, I’d suggest reading more fact-based material – or examining your own perceptions of what you’re reading.

But, yeah, there may be an implicit contradiction: watch out for rightwing political violence, and our embittered political dialogue; but also see Peña as sufficently like us that his conduct might teach us something. I don’t see it that way.]

[Political violence obviously endangers communities and usually proves counterproductive, too. I suspect I might assassinate Vladimir Putin if the opportunity arose. Otherwise, my moment of belief in political violence came in 1968, late at night in New York, listening to live radio reports from Chicago of the police riot that harmed protesters outside the Democratic Convention. To me, at that hour, the violence sounded so crazy, yet so typical of a nation that killed Vietnamese (and young U.S. soldiers) in a senseless war, while generally keeping Blacks to an inferior positions, that I said to Danny and Alice, “The only thing left to do is start assassinating U.S. political figures. Just each shoot as many as we can before they capture us.” I felt that . . . at the end of my rope. By morning, I felt no such impulse, though I still loathed much that our government was doing.]

[Comments on the newspaper’s website (a) advised me to correct my reference to the Democrat to whom Peña lost (Thank you!, which I’ve done here, and advised me that Pelosi’s attacker was arguably not a Republican. The latter may well be true, and I’ll readily say that, as with others on both parties, the attacker’s strongest motives likely were personal and pathological; but his blog posts were full of pro-Trump, proKanye West, anti-immigrant, anti-Semite, and other unfortunate material; and, oddly, a deeper examination of his case illustrates my point particularly vividly!

Pelosi was a highly effective speaker and party leader, for an unusually long time, and not particularly to the far left in the Democratic spectrum. National Republicans decided to (a) vilify her, as they’d done with Hillary Clinton, and (b) make her the face of the Democratic Party, particularly in more conservative or moderate regions. They had quite a campaign to make her demon-like in voters’ minds. Then the January 6^th mob sought to to her physical harm. (She’d particularly earned Trump’s ire, as a woman who stood up to him.) Then a demented fellow generally in sympathy with there madness made this lunatic attack on Paul Pelosi. The argument that he was not a pure Republican (he also reportedly liked Tulsi Gabbard and, at some earlier point in his life, Fidel Castro) is a pimple on the ass of this story. Political violence is dangerous; encouraging it, even through cartoons of congressmen committing it, or through racist mailers, is also somewhat dangerous, because some follower, or some stray lunatic, may listen more seriously to your words than is healthy.)]

 

Wy the Republican Congressional Mess Isn't Funny

Both January 6, 2021 and January 6, 2023 were sad days for our democracy.

The former was something the U.S. had seen only in movies, like Frankenstein and extraterrestrials. An outgoing President attempted a coup. He egged on people who attacked Capitol police and threatened to hang the vice-president. Fortunately, he was thoroughly incompetent.

This year, Kevin McCarthy’s comical contortions to accommodate every crazy demand of his party’s extremists were sad and dangerous. He exemplified the principle-free politician, to whom only power matters. He’ll do anything necessary for his advancement. (Not all politicians are so extreme.)

We didn’t see Republicans invite Democrats to collaborate to get government going again, in some sane fashion. That might have worked. Just trying might have weakened the Republican extremists’ hold over McCarthy. (If he made some reasonable effort, and Dems chose to enjoy the embarrassing spectacle to serve their political purposes, Dems are complicit.)

The extremists are right that the U.S. political parties are too powerful and too inextricably involved in every aspect of our governments. Unwanted by our founders, they’re like prescription drugs: doing something helpful and making life easier, but with dangerous side effects the maker tries to minimize.

Unfortunately, since moderate Republicans value party above country, these extremists could seriously damage the country they purport to love.

The consequences are obvious: greater gridlock and deeper bitterness; hamstringing any beneficial activity by our government; wasting more time than expected on impeaching Biden for policy differences, rather than improper or illegal conduct.

This is childish tit-for-tat. Some Democrats wanted to impeach Donald Trump even before he took office. The Party didn’t support them. Once Trump as President did things any schoolchild could tell were unlawful and against the nation’s interest, Democrats (and a few courageous Republicans) impeached him. There’s no indication Biden has done anything remotely impeachable.

Above all, it’s now more likely the Republicans will plunge us into economic disaster by preventing us from raising the national debt ceiling, as Congress must do periodically. (Congress approves a budget; as a formality, if there’s a deficit, Congress must vote again on it.) Later this year, the nation’s debt will reach the borrowing limit Congress set last time.

The federal debt limit is a weird thing. Suppose my wife and I set a family debt limit. Maybe we owe banks and credit card companies, and are tired of paying more and more interest instead of replacing the muffler. We decide that if we exceed the limit, we’ll stop paying. But the banks and credit card companies didn’t approve our plan. They foreclose, and we’re in even worse shape. Smart!

Experts say a default could cost the U.S. six million jobs and $15 trillion in household wealth. The U.S. credit rating would sink, sending interest rates for homes and cars skyward. We’d be in a recession. Folks on Social Security and Medicare would get nothing. Investors’ loss of confidence in U.S. debt, the only truly safe asset, would explode the world economy.

McCarthy has promised the extremists to refuse this time, without severe budget cuts. He’ll try to impose cuts that hurt us regular New Mexicans, not huge corporations, you can bet. (Higher taxes would make more sense. U.S. taxes are relatively low, particularly on corporations.)

This is governing by extortion. How about some sort of collaborative government with folks who disagree working together for all of us?

That ain’t how party politics works.

                                              – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 15 January 2023, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both stations’ websites.]

[The column mentions, “The extremists are right that the U.S. political parties are too powerful and too inextricably involved in every aspect of our governments. Unwanted by our founders, they’re like prescription drugs: doing something helpful and making life easier, but with dangerous side effects the maker tries to minimize.

“But by placing party above country, Republicans could seriously damage the country they purport to love.”

As I transformed the above column into a short radio commentary, having to shorten it and make it punchier, and turn sentences more declarative, it struck me that in the published column I’d stopped short of hammering home the point about Federal Debt Limit being as foolish as a family creating a personal debt limit and defaulting unnecessarily if the limit were exceeded. What the Republicans are doing, by weaponizing this formality and threatening not to let us pay for stuff we’d already approved and received, unless we make drastic and harmful cuts, is exactly, in the family situation, like me telling my wife, “I’ll throw us into bankruptcy if you don’t cut the kids’ food budget in half and stop feeding that damned dog!” ]

[The column notes that Biden appears to have done nothing remotely impeachable. His troubled son Hunter appears to have profited from Biden’s prominence by cutting deals with foreign countries; but that’s akin to George Bush cutting deals with Bahrain while his father was Vice-President then President; and it’s a lot less harmful to us than Trump’s son-in-law helping Saudi Arabia against its enemies, and getting well-compensated pretty openly. (I’ve seen no indication that George Bush or Hunter Biden influenced or determined U.S. policy. They just got paid.)

Further, as with Trump’s many misdeeds and crimes, impeachment isn’t the right process to re punish activities prior to one’s presidency. (Perhaps illegal activities directly involved in winning the Presidency should be an exception to that.) Whatever Hunter did several years ago isn’t ground for impeachment of Biden as President.]

 

 

Kindred Spirits

“Aid Agencies: Afghans Will Die Because of Ban,” proclaimed a recent Sun-News headline.

The Taliban, days after banning women from higher education, has banned women from working at nongovernmental entities because they aren’t consistently wearing the hijab correctly. The U.N. says women are essential to its humanitarian efforts. Agencies say the ban will cause hundreds, even thousands, to die.

Women are required to wear the hijab in public because some interpretations of Sharia (Islamic law) say they must. Afghan girls can’t go to school without being dressed in black, head to toe, because that’s how the Taliban interprets the words of Allah. Other Muslims merely advise modest clothing.

People will die because of some believers’ interpretation of their god’s word.

Does that seem absurd? Does it seem absurd that, because some people interpret the Bible in a certain way, women will suffer and die? The vicious attacks on women’s health care will not merely deprive women of access to abortions. If we force health centers to close because they provide abortions, they’re also closed to folks needing medical attention for diabetes, infections, high blood pressure, and cancer screenings.

A recent Friday morning discussion over coffee touched on why folks seek some answer, often in religion, to questions about what life is all about, why we’re here, and how it all started; and why we human animals get so attached to our thinking on those important questions.

I invite someone (I won’t say “pro-life,” because I’m as pro-life as one can be, in the sense of wanting life, including human life, to develop freely to its best/happiest potential) to explain in objective terms why the Taliban is wrong to sacrifice Afghans’ health and risk lives for its interpretation of Islam, but we should risk citizens’ health and lives here because of someone’s interpretation of Christianity.

We are talking mere interpretations, human and fallible. Many sincere and pious Muslims see Islam differently. Sincere and pious Christians differ on how best to follow Jesus. Many largely Christian countries have legislated free choice. Our country has a fundamental principle that government shall not dictate its citizens’ activities based on anyone’s religious beliefs. (But if you put enough self-righteous clowns on a supreme court, you get clownish decisions too consequential to amuse anyone.)

A photo of an Afghan boy recovering in a hospital accompanied the Sun-News article. Two women attending him have their heads covered, and wear otherwise modest clothing; but we can see their faces. Maybe the women need to see the kid clearly.

Some in our Friday morning group despise religion, or used to despise it. I felt that way in youth, when all I could see was the hypocrisy of “pious” Christians who accepted (or advocated) discriminating against Blacks and killing Vietnamese.

But I’ve come to see that religions provide hope and support to many. Why should I deprive anyone of that support, or criticize faith? If your expression of your faith isn’t hurting someone else (an Afghan boy dying in hospital for your faith, a gay friend suffering because of your faith, a rural woman deprived of urgently-needed health care), have at it. God (She, He, or It ) Bless You!

Interestingly, that’s what our founders suggested. Each of us gets to decide his/her beliefs and how to handle body and conscience – within minimal limits necessary for the common good.

And I choose to wish you all “Happy New Year!”

                                 – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 8 January 2023, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and on KTAL (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/) and be available on both stations’ websites.]

[I believe in the basic point this column makes; but I had an odd weekend. Some might feel the column treats religions harshly. Friday morning I attended the funeral of a close friend, and watched not only how the caring congregation and the loving words of her family and extended family not only helped her loved ones but became a beautiful event. At times I thought of the column and hoped it wasn’t too harsh. Again Saturday I attended a memorial service for a very nice woman whose husband I know. (She’d died months ago, and at a more advanced age.) Again, her brother began and ended with prayers, and it was clear that shared religion can sure help folks survive tragedies and loss. Still don’t hold with religions being used as weapons to harm other people; but was hoping I hadn’t been unduly harsh in the column. ]

[Meanwhile an Oklahoma state senator filed another vicious bill to deny medical care to people whose gender isn’t straightforward or conventional, or doesn’t match the person’s body. The proposed law would deny anyone under 25 years old from receiving any kind of gender-affirming care. I can’t imagine what kinds of trauma and confusion might accompany a sex-change operation or the desire for one. (I do have friends who’ve been in that situation, and would not hold with denying them medical care.) It’s hard to find a non-obscene term for legislators who would make it a crime to provide such care to those who need it, some of whom might be suicidal.

I understand the likely reply from the righteous: “Well, let ‘em commit suicide. I didn’t ask ‘em to be _________s”

I just don’t agree with that reply, or think those who legislate based on such views should stay out of jail. ]