Getting to Write Thirteen Years of Sunday Columns -- Thanks, Ray!

This one’s for Ray Bernal and ‘cause it’s August.

I met Ray playing basketball at Meerscheidt, fifty years ago. He was a native Las Crucen and city official. I was a reporter. We became friends and stayed that way. He died recently.

When I returned to live here, Ray thought I should be writing a Sunday column. He introduced me to Jim Lawitz, then the Sun-News editor, who asked for a couple of writing samples and hired me. (I say “hired,” but the money was trivial, and was never the point.” My first column was dated 21 August 2011.

It’s been a hell of a ride! I figured to write folksy old-man columns, maybe goofy human-interest stuff. But old friends and enemies, recalling me as the young firebrand publishing what I thought was right, plus new friends presenting me with injustices and problems, torpedoed that idea.

Some columns have been controversial. Some even led friends to worry about our safety. Two successive county sheriffs got so enamored of the wrong people that they made deputies’ lives miserable. People bravely told me their stories, and we shined enough light into dark corners to help facilitate change.

It’s incredibly rewarding to hear a powerless person who’s been abused, or sees a wrong being done by our political representatives, investigate, listening to all sides, and write the fairest, truest column I can on something the public should know.

Meanwhile, I’ve tried to advocate on issues, but more to articulate a feeling: that men, including me, are too damned self-absorbed; that nature, poor folks, underlings, and ethnic minorities get unfairly short shrift; that discussing stuff collegially – speaking frankly but listening closely – often actually works. Also that none of us – surely not I! – knows the whole truth. And that, even in tough times, we’re all just folks, with more in common than we realize. 

 

Particularly during the first several years, some folks showered me with the vilest possible insults. Others liked the column. Strangers sometimes called me up or approached me in public to agree or disagree, or to thank me for putting into words stuff they were thinking. Sometimes what they said, or their tone, moves me deeply. If not for those heartfelt thanks, I’d have given up the column long ago.

A gentleman in the Farmers Market said he owed me a big debt of gratitude. How come? “Well, when my son was younger, he was turning really rightist. He lived with his mother’s family, who are more conservative. When we’d hear you on the radio, he’d say, ‘That guy is completely full of ____!’ He took your name in vain a lot. But then he’d research what you were talking about, and say later, ‘You know, that guy was actually right.’”

I ran into a man at a City Council meeting. He asked if I recognized him. I didn’t. He was a man who’d been wrongly accused, years earlier, of a particularly vile crime. After investigating, I’d concluded the charge was bogus, and wrote why. The police soon reached the same conclusion. Whole incident was tragic. No one ever fully recovers from such a situation. It gave me joy to find him working again, doing good again, and still with his loyal family.

So, thanks, Ray. Thanks for the platform, Sun-News. Thanks to friends and strangers who’ve read these columns and reflected on them. Thanks, Las Cruces!

I love this place.

                                                 – 30 --

 

[This column appeared Sunday, 1 September, 2024, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, and will presently be up 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, streaming at www.lccommunityradio.org/). For further information on the topic of this column, please go to my blog, https://soledadcanyon.blogspot.com/ .]

[Like anything you start, then continue, the columns have taken on a life of their own. There’s a passel of Sundays between August 2011 and this morning. Because the spoken versions air each week, I’ll have folks recognize my voice and approach me in the oddest of situations. I also receive heartfelt thanks from people who’ve clearly enjoyed some of the columns. That’s moving, humbling, and a great discouragement to giving them up!]

[Idly, just now, I searched the blog posts for “Controversy.” The first listed was a 2012 post on the City giving an award to a prade float that included the Confederate flag:

The Great Confederate Flag Float Controversy? What’s sad is that the Tea Party is too cowardly to be candid. What’s important is not to let this nonsense lure us into an overreaction that would intimidate free speech.

I know that flag. I saw it on cars driven by people who threatened me and chased me back out onto the dirt roads (where the colored stayed), when I was a civil rights worker in the South in 1965.

It was the flag of a "nation" created to defend slavery.

Next came a 2015 meditation on the books Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Looking Backward, then a comment this year on book-banning, a column on the 2014 Soil and Water Commission election, then a post-Dobbs outcry (headed “Supreme Court on a Rampage – Wake Me when we Get Back to the Inquisition” that starts:

It feels rotten to be a U.S. citizen.

I recall pre-Roe times. Although abortion’s normally a safe, simple procedure, I watched a female relative endure a life-threatening situation because abortions were illegal and hers couldn’t be done in a hospital. That sticks in your mind.

Last week’s supreme court decision is horrendous for many reasons. It will mean some people will die or be jailed for family-planning, it signifies, in itself and in the court’s unnecessarily broad language, a serious eclipse of personal freedoms.

These justices did this with glee, writing the decision the way someone walking off with your wallet might unnecessarily stick his finger in your eye as he left.

[There’s no shortage of contorversies: but I can also search “Community” and “Gratitude” [“Desert”] and find more cheerful or reflective columns. Searching “harmony” yields 2019 reflections on Jesus and Patrul Rinpoche sparked by an encounter with two Catholics in the farmers market, thanks to the County Commission for voting to support Lynn Ellins’s 2013 decision that our constitution gave him no right to deny marriage to same-sex couples, and a couple on spring in the desert. It’s kind of like looking through a photo album – the sudden clear memory of a moment you’d forgotten, and then a bit of gratitude that, somehow, someone gave you a camera way back when, or offered you a weekly space to say what you thought.]

[Some of those columns I wrote rapidly, almost in feverishly; others followed many interviews, some secret, and careful hours of research; still others were spawned by a moment I loved, such as "Bicycling to the Gratitude Cafe" (2018) and its 2024 sequel Some I wrote after an hour or two of relecting on controversies I wasn’t ready to opine on, and wondering what kind of humongous ego is required to muster the assumption that I have anything to say that might interest or inform anyone else.]