A Damned Fine Accomplishment

I’ll admit I didn’t watch New Mexico State’s Aggie football team play Auburn.

Auburn is a storied SEC Conference football team. Saturday Auburn plays frequent National Champion Alabama in their annual rivalry game, the Iron Bowl.

The nation’s present Number 1 team (and defending champs), the Georgia Bulldogs, also call the SEC home. Auburn had just beaten Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, and Arkansas.

NMSU was a presentable football team in my youth. I fondly remember friends like Po James and Al Barnes, who went on to the NFL. More recently, NMSU was nationally scorned as the worst Division I college football team. The Aggies lost 21 consecutive games.

Teams may get invited to a bowl game if they win six games and at least half of their games that season. That didn’t happen for NMSU after 1959 and 1960 until 2017. Then not again until coach Jerry Kill showed up last year.

Kill coached well in the Big Ten Conference, at Minnesota, until health issues interrupted his career in 2015. I thought NMSU football lucky when Coach Kill decided to coach again, at 60, and chose NMSU. Watching box scores and occasionally gabbing with his players confirmed that instinct. He took “the worst team in football” to a bowl. It won.

Something new was happening here.

But NMSU is in Conference USA. Not the Big Ten or the SEC. NMSU will play undefeated Liberty for the Conference USA Championship December 1 in Virginia. I was impressed a week earlier when the Aggies beat Western Kentucky in Bowling Green. This is only the second time ever the Aggies have won more than eight games. The other was 1960, when NMSU went undefeated.

Why was NMSU playing Auburn last week? College football has “Money Games.” A major school pays some clearly weaker team to play on the major school’s home field and get its butt kicked. For example, last Saturday, Alabama beat Chattanooga 66-10.

NMSU would get $1.7 million for undergoing a lopsided defeat. Big bucks. One expert predicted Auburn would win 41-10. “Not a whole lot to say here. New Mexico is a decent mid major, but quarterback Diego Pavia is banged up. Auburn is playing its best ball of the season and will continue that in this game, a tune up for a winnable Iron Bowl.”

I didn’t even try to figure out how to watch the game on TV. Usually I check the Aggies’ results on-line, but I forgot. Not until midday Sunday, when I was out front doing yard work and a pal stopped his pickup truck to gab, did I learn anything!

The Aggies beat Auburn. Not by a last-minute field goal or a fluke fumble-recovery run back for a touchdown and a one-point victory.

The Aggies beat Auburn 31-10. No fluke bounce, but a dominant win.

Congratulations!

Coach Kill, quarterback Pavia, and the whole team did something special – by truly being a team, with single-minded dedication and guts.

Yes, Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t dead are starving. Polls say we could elect as President a guy who broke laws to stay in the White House after losing an election. And recent headlines suggest football is frying the brains of more boys and young men than we ever realized. So, in the big picture, this is what it is; but I admire hard work and exceptional skill when I see it, and Coach Kill is showing us some.

                                                        – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 26 November, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on KRWG’s website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

[Because of Thanksgiving, my deadline for that column was the Tuesday before Turkey Day by noon. Since then, the Aggies have won again, taking down another conference rival before the conference championship game with Liberty. Meanwhile, Auburn played the Iron Bowl with Alabama. Until the last second, Auburn was winning. Aggie fans were joking that if Auburn beat 8th-ranked Alabama, maybe NMSU belonged in the top ten too. But Alabama scored on a long, last-minute touchdown pass.

Still, NMSU holds the second biggest upset of the season, if you figure by adding the points by which they were the underdog (expected to lose by 25) to the points they won by on the field (21), which is 46 points. I hope some loony NMSU fan with his or heart in the right place bet money on the Aggies and made a bundle.

The Aggies play Liberty at 5 pm our time on Friday, December 1^st. I’ll try to figure out which channel CBSS is on cable. They won’t be favored; Liberty is undefeated; but they could win. Win or lose, this has been a good season.

One thing the good season means is that other, bigger schools will be on the phone to Coach Kill or his agent. NMSU’s classic experience, mostly in basketball, is that a successful coach is soon gone that way. Maybe there’s a chance Coach Kill stays. He likes it here, but other schools have more money to spend on a football coach. He says he’s told NMSU what it would take to keep him here. That likely means an enhanced contract, but likely also means expenditures to improve facilities here. That could leave NMSU making some tough value judgments.

In the mid-1970s, NMSU wanted to build a new stadium. One Friday the County Commission, then three guys meeting in a tiny conference room in the old Courthouse building, agreed to put to the voters issueing bonds obligating the county, to help build a new stadium. Weirdly, the commissioners asked the news folks not to say anything until Monday! Surprisingly, the Sun-News (not yet Gannett-owned) actually did hold the story, even though it was destined to be one of the year’s biggest local controversies. (As the El Paso Times guy here, I told ‘em that of course I wouldn’t hold back a news story of such public interest.) There was quite an active campaign by equally passionate supporters and opponents of using public funds for such a purpose. ]

 

Getting Real about Thanksgiving?

Wherever you spend Thanksgiving, give thanks.

Give thanks not only for your personal good fortune, but also because: you are neither a Hamas hostage nor a Gazan mourning your family and scrambling through the bloody chaos to keep yourself and your kid alive; you are reading this; you live in relatively peaceful southern New Mexico, and somebody loves you (or did love you or will love you); and because even if there’s much in your life that’s grim, you have breath and the power to give something to others.

Going home, and anticipating quarrels over people’s varied politics and religions? Try a different tack. If you were in some other country, you’d be curious about the beliefs and customs of the people. Instead of arguing with your family, be glad for them that they have beliefs or ideas that do something for them, no matter how nutty those ideas seem to you. Newsflash! You won’t convert them this week to your more reasonable beliefs, so take a break. Enjoy what you enjoy about them. If there’s nothing you enjoy about them, ask questions ‘til you stumble onto something. Pretend the word “I” has left your vocabulary to go visit its own family.

Dreading the visit because someone (or everyone) there is a malevolent jerk? Arm yourself with the knowledge that vicious or potentially hurtful things people say and do are like bottles of poison they offer you; but you only feel the pain or the anger if YOU choose to drink from it. Almost all really vicious people suffered something vicious that was too big or too early in their lives for them to evade. It’s still with them. Recalling that might mitigate your annoyance at their words or conduct. As long as you’re stuck there, try two mental games: first, try to identify the pain they never could outgrow; second, try to envision that person in ten years. That exercise might help, if you can’t pity (or love) the person now.

(A third tack, for the more adventurous: ask quietly, and very casually, some direct question, such as “What is it about me that so irritates you?” or “Why are you so obsessed with denigrating my [employer, son, daughter, spouse, love, or artistic passion]. But don’t dignify the answer by arguing. Maybe shake head and smile, “Good thing I don’t feel that way.”)

I’m not saying to abandon your beliefs or values, only that how we feel is far more within our control than we often suppose. Not some tight, repressive control, but seeing your thoughts clearly, seeing that although people are as they are, your thoughts are yours.

We each get to cling to the edge of this planet for only a nanosecond, as the Earth counts time,. (That being so, why waste time being hurt or pissed off?) That, maybe, is the point of Thanksgiving, not some fable about how well colonists in Massachusetts got on with the tribes.

Besides, if you believe in some religion, these conflicts are trivial garbage that you’ll leave behind when you move on to the Happy Hunting Grounds – and being nice to folks who could help punch your ticket. If you believe this lifetime is all we get, that’s even more reason not to let people muck it up with the small stuff.

Besides, two things (beyond exercise and a sane diet) lengthen lives: gratitude and laughter. Cultivate both. Happy Thanksgiving!

                                – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 19 November, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper’s website ("Wherever You Spend Thanksgiving, Give Thanks!"), as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

[This is what it is; but as soon as I sent it off, I was annoyed at myself over the 5^th paragraph. What I aimed at was the idea of addressing root issues directly but dispassionately, letting whoever annoys you get something said, frankly. A good idea. But, extended to a discussion of one’s partner, it seems unlikely to work. I can listen all day to the crazy insults people aim on me; but if someone who knew us was blasting my wife, I’d not just sit and listen. I’d keep my temper, but respond with a frankness that might not sit too well. ]

[Writing this, I kept remembering sitting on a plane landing in ___, Florida, around Thanksgiving or Christmas, 1995. My father had just moved to ___. We never had the kinds of problems the column discusses: we differed on some things, but spoke frankly without quarreling. But behind me sat a man, and a woman, strangers: clearly he was gay and either had come out recently, much to his parents’ dismay, or hadn’t quite come out yet. The woman sitting next to him had political differences with her parents too strong to discuss amicably. They commiserated, as the plane circled. He snidely referred to Orlando as “Death’s Waiting Room.” They told their stories and joked together about each going to visit the other’s parents instead of his or her own. These days, with our much-enhanced partisanship, I keep hearing the same fears in friends and acquaintances about to spend time with families they’re not simpatico with. Taking a stab at discussing that seemed more worthwhile than talking about the tribes and the turkeys or saying, yet again, how grateful I am personally for a better life than I’ve deserved.]

[Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving!]

 

 

 

Our Recent Eection

These are turbulent times.

Tuesday’s election reflected that. In the mayoral race, City Councilor Kassandra Gandara, who seemed like an incumbent, had a narrow initial lead, but ultimately lost after five rounds of ranked-choice vote-counting. That majority, narrowly beating an earnest, well-meaning, and experienced candidate, speaks to widespread discontent here.

Sussing out the sources of that discontent, and addressing them, is the challenge facing us all, local officials and aged Sunday columnists alike. Obviously the economy, the unsettling times, homelessness, partisanship, and petty crime were factors. Maybe some questionable police shootings, and the contradictory need to train and support police officers while reining them in, played some role. I’m sorry to see Gandara go. I like her and thought her intentions good for the city, although I question the ethics and legality of a sort of Las Cruces “executive committee” about which councilors not on it know little or nothing. I wish Mayor-Elect Eric Enriquez the best.

I voted for Councilor Johana Bencomo, listing Gabriel Duran second, and welcome her re-election,. I wonder how long-ago mayor Bill Mattiace will affect the council. Tessa Abeyta has worked hard and done some good; but Mattiace’s long-standing popularity (and perhaps a reaction against an all-woman council) prevailed, by 50 votes.

I’m glad the Las Cruces School Board will stay sane. Nationally and locally, education is under attack by folks who would whitewash U.S. history and who think it’s a waste of time trying to make kids who are different in any way feel comfortable and motivated to learn. How, and how much, the controversy over an unused library book affected the election I can’t say.

Standardized tests have long rated our state education low. That’s fact. I don’t know the answer. Neither do any candidates. Our best hope is to elect people who not only know education and care about kids, but are open to evidence-based changes and improvements. Most kids are “different” somehow, particularly here. School prayer or saying slaves didn’t have it so bad won’t help.

Nationally, it was a fairly good election for progressives. Voters enshrined women’s reproductive rights in Ohio’s Constitution. Virginia’s state senate stayed Democratic, and the house of delegates flipped Democratic. Despite Mr. Biden’s political weakness.

Conventional wisdom says that women’s reproductive rights are the banner that will lead Democrats, including President Biden, to 2024 success. I have mixed feelings.

Women’s choice has been a key issue for me since I was 21. I welcomed Roe v. Wade. I welcome now the intense focus on repairing the damage done by the present version of the U.S. Supreme Court. Republican heartlessness and intransigence on the issue is badly out-of-step with how most people feel, and Democrats should stress that.

But many citizens feel real and deep discontents. Despite Biden’s relative success with the economy, people are stretched thin. Our system hasn’t changed. Corporate greed and power still keep the system skewed toward the rich, while Republicans have long won elections by telling voters it’s all the fault of the poor. That’s exacerbated by two wars, a dangerously changing climate, a homelessness epidemic, and a recent pandemic. Democrats must articulate persuasive thoughts on those subjects. Blind support for Netanyahu’s Israel will prove a heavy weight for Democrats.

Folks still dismiss the rage fueling Trump Mania as racist resentment. (Some is.) Democrats and journalists must recognize that citizens feel more justified forms of anger that Republicans help misdirect.

                             – 30 –

 

 [The above column appeared Sunday, 12 November, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

[The mayoral election tends to answer conservatives’ knee-jerk criticism of ranked-choice voting. Yeah, it’s new, and I guess that’s scary for some; but it worked, giving voters a more complete voice without the expense of a special runoff election; and it doesn’t necessarily help for progressives. Here, Gandara might have been declared the winner, with the most first-round votes but less than 50% of the votes; but votes from other candidates’ supporters kept him in it, until he got 70% of Isabella Solis’s supporters and jumped into the lead. I hope folks remember this. People ask me whether ranked-choice voting is a good thing: I reply that it is, if you strongly value democracy. How Mr. Enriquez conducts himself during the next four years will decide how I feel about the individual result this year, but I remain in favor of the principle.]

[A conservative friend points out why no one at LCPS should be dancing in the streets or resting on their laurels. The progressive “slate,” had there been one, would have been Board Chair Teresa Tenorio, appointee Patrick Nolan, and former Chair Ed Frank, trying to unseat incumbent board member Carol Cooper. Tenorio won reelection in district 4 by 3% of the vote over Julia Ruiz; but since 27% of the votes went to a second challenger, Edward Howell, conservatives quite reasonably feel Ruiz would have prevailed in a two-person race. Patrick Nolan won in District 1 with 57% of the vote. However, Ed Frank beat Cooper by about 30 votes, subject to recount. (So two of the three won close with under 50% of the total.]

[Just after sending the column in, I read on-line this object lesson in applying rightwing ideas to education. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed political cronies to destroy Florida’s small public honors college. It was a fairly progressive environment, with kids whose brains entitled them to be there but whose personal habits and beliefs weren’t always what Ron might have wanted. So he fired the President and the Board, installing political cronies, including one who’d organized bogus attacks on “critical race theory.” They wanted to get rid of free-thinkers, and did: hundred immediately transferred elsewhere, 35 of them to a single small western Massachusetts liberal arts college. Then they changed standards, recruiting a lot of great athletes with lower test scores. It’s a joke from here, but a personal tragedy for some of those kids, and shows that with enough power you can turn a college rightwing. But why would you want to? Why chase all the top students? What level of stupidity and insecurity does it take to be Ron DeSantis?]

[Not saying each school board member is perfect (though I tend to think highly of them); but we dodged a bullet by rejecting candidates favored by our conservative friends here.]

Reflections

Last week I was startled that several people in their fifties to seventies seemed unaware of anti-Semitism in the U.S.

One asked me why people used to dislike Jews.

Well, most folks were fond of Jesus Christ. Their churches taught that the Jews had killed Jesus. Jews driven from their original homeland long ago, were a minority everywhere. Because Christians couldn’t lend money at interest, and people needed loans, some Jews became the moneylenders. Like Shylock. Which did not endear them to everyone.

A serious golfer noted that although I play many sports, I don’t golf. I explained that while my father loved tennis, he’d never learned golf, because Jews weren’t allowed in most country clubs. My friend was shocked.

While Hitler’s Germany took anti-Semitism to an extreme, Jews faced discrimination and even pogroms (mobs beating and even killing Jews) in many countries. In the U.S., covenants prohibited selling homes to Blacks or Jews. In the excellent 1947 film, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Gregory Peck plays a reporter who, when moving to New York City to work for a magazine, tells people he’s Jewish, to see how people treat him. (Rather shabbily.) He writes an expose on widespread anti-Semitism.

Particularly during the current violence in the Middle East, we should recall that.

But I’ve never had a clue how we could solve the Middle-East problem, or how British and U.S. leaders should have proceeded in 1915 or 1947.

I used to wonder if folks in countries where U.S. oil companies ruined the land or where United Fruit and our CIA supported vicious dictators, might come here and start killing a bunch of us as a reprisal. That’d be both tragic and understandable. We are not our international corporations; but we suffer them, and belittle the damage they do elsewhere.

In the Middle East, both peoples, Jews and Palestinians, are legitimately aggrieved, and have histories of suffering, and have been dispossessed of their lands and homes and societies. (They also have competing religious idols telling them the land is theirs, which complicates matters.)

Nothing justifies attacking civilians, as Hamas did. Even in war, that’s theoretically a crime, although nightly bombings of London or German cities all happened, as did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Just as we are not our international corporations, or our Ku Klux Klan, the average Palestinian is not Hamas. S/he might hate Israel, understandably; but most Palestinians are not part of Hamas. I understand Israel’s desire to destroy Hamas forever. I understand Palestinians resenting Israel, and the U.S. Palestinians were treated like our tribes. Palestine was a country on the map, that no longer exists; and the nation where Palestine was treats Palestinians as second-class citizens. Even now, what lands Palestinians still have, on the West Bank, are being quietly taken by “settlements” the Israeli government supports and we wink at.

Of course you’d want to wipe out the folks who massacred more than a thousand people to make a political statement!

But, equally of course, if you grew up in refugee camps hearing about the homes your parents or grandparents had, or had been driven out by “settlements,” you’d resent Israel. U.S. politicians and college professors who point this out should not be censured, or censored!

Meanwhile, Israel’s righteous anger has probably killed 8,000 Gaza civilians, and is still killing. Fellow human beings.

All, ultimately, because of England’s imperialism and the disregard of British and U.S. leaders for others.

                      – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 5 November, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints.  A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/

[btw, this column appeared in Sunday’s paper; but one person who called said some friends were glad to see I was still writing these columns.  I do, every week.  However, the newspaper has made some changes in how the paper is made up: a group does it and the editorial pages are largely if not wholly identical for all regional papers.  That means sometimes my column doesn’t make it in the print edition; but it should be on-line at the Sun-News; most Sunday mornings, as today, I then reprint it on my blog, often adding comments; I then send the blog version to KRWG for its website.  I also record the radio commentary version and send it to KRWG and upload it to play Monday on KTAL-LP.  That means, if you don’t find it in the print edition of the Sunday Sun-News, feel free to check on-line, but it doesn’t reach my blog and KRWG ‘til later in the day.]

[I ran into a friend who is a rabbi.  After greetings and such, the first thing he said was, “I have no idea how anyone would solve this.”  I never have had.  I feel like lots of those responsible lived in the previous century: they were British or U.S. leaders without enough understanding of the people who lived in Palestine, or without enough concern to think things out, or passionate partisans for two opposed causes.  By now, both Jews and Palestinians have legitimate grievances; and, on both sides, leaders and others have acted badly.   Someone shared an amazing account (said to be true, perhaps apocryphal) of a Jewish woman who left Europe after the Holocaust.  Once in Israel, they kept promising her a house, for longer than they’d said it would take.  Finally they told her they had a house, and the next day took her and her modest set of belongings to it.  However, the table still bore the plates and cups and silverware of the Palestinian family who had lived in the house.  Much as she wanted a home, she asked them to return her to where she had been staying, saying that no matter how bad things got she wouldn’t do to others what had been done to her.

          There are also numerous internet memes on the theme of Israeli troops killing Palestinian civilians, and verbiage referring to the possibility of turning into what you hate.

          Those are not entirely fair.  They are also not anti-Semitism.  They, and much being said that folks want to expel students, fire professors, or censure politicians for, and political commentary.  As a general rule, they should not be censored or their authors punished.  I loathe Hamas, which kills innocent people and wishes to destroy Israel completely.  However, Hamas has no chance of doing that.  Rightly or wrongly, Israel came into existence and exists, with a population and unique culture. 

          But I loathe Netanyahu, too.  (He and Hamas depend upon each other.)  He too is dead set against partition, with two states side-by-side; he has helped support Hamas, knowing its extremism and the settlements would make a two-state solution unfeasible.  (Israel does a lot I dislike; but how do you agree to a separate state of which the likely leaders have sworn to extirpate you?)  Every time there is apparent progress toward peace, it is sabotaged by Hamas, Netanhyahu, or both.

          I don’t know precisely what we should be doing; but I’m pretty damned sure it doesn’t involve censoring other people. ]