About 120 years ago, small towns argued over roads. Horses and bicycles were how we traveled. Some crazies thought horseless carriages were the coming thing, though they were noisy and unreliable, with constant tire blowouts. Mules often pulled the fancy toys out of mud puddles.
Soon towns tried to modernize roads – despite bitter rearguard actions by city aldermen who owned livery stables, harness factories, or bicycle shops. Tinkerers made fortunes, established fortunes were lost.
Fifty years ago, when I was a young reporter here, Tommy Tomson was a powerful city commissioner. He owned the Palms, our biggest motel and conference venue, but completion of the Interstate 10 section running from I-25 toward Deming turned Picacho Avenue into a ghost town. Can even ten per cent of our citizens find the Palms on a map? And 150 years ago, Mesilla, on established wagon routes, was our great political and commercial center. Las Cruces was scattered farms. Then came the railroad. Stopping in Cruces.
Once wagon taverns lined major roads across many states, providing travelers and buses food, lodging, wheels, harnesses, and whatnot. If you were surveying for the planned railroad, you hid your identity from those folks, who were determined to maintain their income-producing wagon taverns, and demanded politicians delay railroad-building. So did mayors and major citizens of canal towns, and mule breeders and tow-path operators, although railroads would move goods faster, further, and more efficiently than canals.
Would you have invested in whaling ships if you’d talked to Thomas Edison?
Two headlines today reminded me of that stuff. Our President has lowered royalties to help oil companies dig more oil wells on federal land; and he has shut down wind farms in the Atlantic. Leading us rapidly backwards.
Tow-path operators and livery-stable owners couldn’t stop time. Nor can Mr. Trump. Whether or not we like it, whether or not we admit humans caused climate-craziness, whether or not we inherited Standard Oil stock from our grandparents, the world’s immediate need is for extremely-efficient vehicles and renewable energy sources. Future fortunes will be made by companies – or countries – that lead the world in figuring out how to provide those.
While most of the world, notably China and Norway, struggles to solve those issues, we struggle to get our heads deeper into the sand. While most of the world, inspired by the development of mRNA vaccines at stemming the pandemic, is working toward using those to combat flu and even cancer, the U.S. has reduced funding. Our leader loathes mRNA vaccines because the pandemic (and his denial of it) embarrassed him publicly, and the major issue in world affairs is how anything affects DJT’s bruised ego and swelling purse. Meanwhile, we are racing to revive measles.
We will intentionally fall behind in every important scientific and commercial area!?
I can’t write 100+ years ago without saluting Clayton Flowers. Mr. Flowers, whose mother taught in a Virginia one-room schoolhouse, was born Christmas Day 1915. Before the U.S. entered the Great War. He moved North to enlist in the Army for World War II, not wishing to be stationed in the South. Before the U.S. Army was even integrated, he was a war pilot, a Tuskegee Airman, and trained other pilots. They collectively won a Congressional Medal of Honor. After decades of teaching school in New York City, he moved in the early 1980s to wonderful Las Cruces, where he still lives. That’s bloody awesome!
– 30 –
[The above column appeared Sunday, 28 December 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website and will presently appear on KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]
[Happy New Year, everyone!]
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