We celebrate 20 years of columns

“I want to stop and smell the roses,” he said. “If you want it, you can have it. Otherwise I’m going to shut it down.”

That was newsman Hal Rhodes, founder of New Mexico News Services. He had started NMNS in 1997 to provide opinion columns to New Mexico newspapers. When Hal was ready to step aside in 2004, he passed the baton to me. 

We are now celebrating 20 years of a tiny business. The writers and some of our newspapers have changed but not the mission, and that is to provide views on New Mexico issues by New Mexico writers based on long experience and reporting. 

In 20 years and thousands of columns some of the issues and players have changed, and public discussion is more intense. Past columns mark progress and paralysis.

On Oct. 1, 2004, my first column was about the film industry. Movie makers had chosen Clovis to film “Believe in Me” about a girls’ basketball team in a small town. When production crews arrived in Clovis, they were greeted with banners and signs saying, “Believe in Clovis!” The Hollywood folks were touched. That’s not the treatment they get in L.A. or New York. 

I wrote, “What we need now is a production studio to keep more of this work in the state.” Now we have multiple studios.

On the same date my late friend Harold Morgan delivered the first of many pronouncements on the economy: “The national economy is in decent shape. New Mexico is another story.” Unemployment claims were down, but wages here were lower than the national average. The state’s productivity only looked good with Intel in the picture. Subtract Intel and our productivity plunged, and that too meant lower wages. “The only answer is education,” Harold wrote. “If New Mexico workers offer more to employers, the wages will be higher.”

In some areas New Mexico evolved. We worked through such challenges as casinos and bad behavior at the Public Regulation Commission, but in other ways the state remained stuck.

Mary Dale Bolson, secretary of the state Children Youth and Families Department, talked 20 years ago about the importance of teachers to kids, especially lonely, isolated kids who don’t necessarily come to the attention of the state. She talked about the importance of respect, acceptance and listening. 

I wrote: “What the charter schools – and education reform – try to do is achieve a smaller class size. Reformers believe, correctly, that it improves learning, but Bolson points out that it also ‘meets a child’s need for attachment.’ The best of the new programs (and the old) offer kids a mentor and an emotional anchor.”

We’re still talking about smaller class size.

2004 was an election year, and the pattern is little changed. I wrote about swing voters: “So far the list has included Hispanic people, ‘Security Moms,’ NASCAR guys, middle-aged women and the Religious Right. Fact is, in a presidential election this close and this polarized, anybody could be a swing voter – barbershop quartets, barbed-wire collectors or one-armed paper hangers.”

In the same vein, I quoted a woman saying that she and her husband didn’t share the same political beliefs and didn’t talk politics. “It’s the elephant in the living room,” she said.

I wrote: “The elephants have certainly multiplied this year. In a charged atmosphere when nearly everyone has an opinion – and a strong one, at that – we’re all tiptoeing around elephants… These must be the most divisive races in memory.” 

Little did I know.

It’s tempting to say, the more things change the more they stay the same, but I think it’s more complicated. A better recollection of recent history, successes and failures, would improve the quality of public discourse.