Musings before a Deadline

The moments between finishing our radio show at 10 am. Wednesday and submitting my Sunday newspaper column at noon Wednesday aren’t usually too contemplative.

Today my head is spinning from discussions of high school acting, the gruesome facts of global climate madness (euphemized “long-term weather patterns” in federal grant applications), and our county commission realizing you can’t always trust big-money folks.

We got to talk to a couple of people who, like our radio station, help our community understand what’s happening: state climatologist Dave Dubois, a favorite guest whose joyful manner contrasts sharply with the bad news he relates, and Heath Haussamen, whose local reporting helps us see through the political haze. (Maybe, next life, I’ll get first and last names starting with the same letter.)

Talking about acting reminds me of a play I didn’t see, an amateur production of Agatha Christie’s suspense play (its name sanitized to “Ten Little Indians” and then to “And then there Were None”), in which ten strangers are lured to a remote island where someone slowly kills them all, in ways from a nursery rhyme, and, as the group dwindles, each survivor reasonably supposes the killer is one of the remaining survivors. The last two – a war hero whose speeding car killed two kids and a former governess whose inattention caused a child’s death – are (a) slowly falling in love with each other and (b) increasingly sure the other is the killer. In one amateur production, right after World War II, the roles were played by a Marine bomber pilot who’d flown in the Pacific and his new bride, a former governess for a prominent family in Washington D.C.

I wish I could ask them how that felt, the similarities between roles and lives, and the dramatically mixed feelings their characters portrayed. I wish we’d had videotape back then, so’s I could watch, too, because a some months later I was born to them.

As always, the climate tragedy sets my mind spinning like a top: what to say about a federal government with its head willfully in the sand and county commissioners who just wouldn’t listen to folks suggesting more care and judgment in dealing with the rolling-in-money Project Jupiter folks. “Yo, they’ll have an army of top lawyers looking at every document!” we all shouted, hoping the commissioners understood that corporations’ sole duty is to maximize profits.

Our folks blissfully approved a deal that, as Commissioner Susie Chaparro (spoilsport!) complained, was still full of blank pages. Surely violating our open meetings law, they assigned one commissioner to “fix it” in secret meetings with the developers. Heath says a key change involved “potable water.” Now we learn that the project, which had billed itself as posing no problem for our parched community, will use insanely more water than planned. But it’s “non-potable.” Do our leaders know that all that water comes from the same underground pool, just maybe from from higher or lower levels? (The folks supplying the water have applied to dig deeper wells.)

As always, all this climate doom-and-gloom seems absurd, when the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the birds are singing away, and the hummingbirds are enjoying our bright red flowers. Who can imagine your grandchildren will be climbing a huge border wall, desperately trying to reach an increasingly crowded Canada?

It’s a terrible, wonderful world. Let’s enjoy what’s great, and fight for what’s right.

                         – 30 --

 

The above column appeared Sunday, 19 April 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper’s website and (presently) on KRWG’s website. 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/ ).

Not mentioned in the column is that 14April this year would have been my father’s 117^th birthday, helping put that Agatha Christie play in my mind. I never got to see my father act, although he had done plenty of it in his youth, and although all through childhood my mother often played the lead in area productions.

Mentioned is Heath Haussamen. You can read his local stories at https://haussamen.com/ .