Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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You know the old song lyrics “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am?” I’ve been hearing that on a loop in my inner ear over the past two weeks since Donald Trump pulled off what some have called a surprise landslide but which, after the votes were counted, seems to be more of an anti-Kamala “boy are they blue” wave. In other words, I doubt that America has embraced Trump because he’s received a lower popular vote percentage than almost every prior winner. Still, America cou...
As I watched the Kennedy siblings close ranks against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. because of his support for Donald Trump, it reminded me of the fragility of human bonds. Over the past eight years, since Trump burst onto the political scene, I've witnessed the crumbling of so many relationships, including marriages and childhood friendships, based upon an absolute inability to deal with difference and dissent. I know very few conservatives who have disowned liberal friends. The opposite is far more c...
The other night, I took a friend out for her birthday at an upscale French restaurant. The food is magnificent, as authentic as anything I tasted when I lived in Paris – cue the accordion music. But even perfection has its tics. Normally, service at this restaurant is sublime. But this night, I had a problem. After having a wonderful meal and then calculating a respectable tip of 20% on a pretty expensive bill, since the service was OK but not exceptional, I gave the waiter the money. He d...
Every year, during the last few days of June, I sit at my computer and wait impatiently for the most important Supreme Court decisions to be announced. Last year, the picnic brought the Dobbs decision, which ended legalized abortion, so it seemed like anything else would be a let-down. Boy was I wrong. Last week, the Supreme Court announced that giving someone an advantage because of their race was illegal, unconstitutional and dead wrong. If you thought that this was already the law of the...
I've been called a lot of things in my life, some of them endearing, most of them not. When Barack Obama referred to conservatives like me as people who cling to our guns and religion, I was offended. Later, when Hillary Clinton called conservatives who weren't going to vote for her a "basket of deplorables," it looked as if another Democrat was employing crude, awkward rhetoric to gin up her base. It had the opposite effect, which helped put another guy in office who wasn't shy about insulting...
It’s very easy these days to say that social media is toxic. People act in ways they’d never do in real life, because it isn’t real life. They act like feral wolves, because they can. The Twitter police don’t carry guns, and their badges are imaginary. In fact, social media is one big, imaginary world, and we’re all way too wrapped up in things that don’t matter – the opinions expressed by strangers in public. Last week, Jon Gruden’s life exploded because of some private email exchanges that...
Seven years ago, Lucy Flowers died. It's taken a while for me to write those words in exactly that way – "Lucy Flowers died." I've written about it on frequent occasion, but usually turn to euphemisms: "Left us." I also employed "passed away," "rejoined my father," "passed on," "shed this mortal coil," "went to a better place," "found peace," "greeted the angels" and other Hallmark card turns of language. The clinical finality of "Lucy Flowers died" was something I avoided because it sounded har...
The other day, someone reminded me that I had a public Facebook page entitled "Christine Flowers, Columnist and Radio Host." I rarely post there, which is why I'd almost forgotten about it. My old editor had suggested I create a public page, after stalkers and people who didn't like what I wrote (almost exclusively readers and agitators from the left), had done some very unsavory things. She thought that setting up a "public" space would protect me and my loved ones from the usual abuses of...
I am so glad the whole white supremacy and gun nut narrative is over, so we can get back to the one about voter suppression. Those horrific shootings, late last month, diverted our attention away from what President Joe Biden has called "Jim Crow on steroids," namely the recent controversial voting reform legislation passed in Georgia and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp. Anyone who has actually read the almost 100 pages of the Georgia law would know that it is not an attempt to keep Black voters from...
Tom Wolf, lame-duck governor of Pennsylvania, announced on Twitter that he wanted the commonwealth to legalize pot. His comment was hailed as timely, necessary and courageous by many of his lame-duck followers on social media. There is a huge constituency in Pennsylvania, and nationally, for ending what some call a prohibition, and others view as a common-sense limitation on recreational marijuana. It is important to note that, neither Wolf nor I, are referring to medical cannabis, which has...
I’m pretty open about my pro-life views. I want abortion criminalized, banned and recognized as an act of inhumanity. I agree with Mother Theresa that “abortion has become the greatest destroyer of peace, because it destroys two lives; the life of the child, and the conscience of the mother.” I am also a Catholic, and I am quite proud of the fact that my church is the most vocal, most unapologetically pro-life among the three, great, monotheistic traditions. I know that there are some Catho...
I was once fired by an employer because they did not like the way that I tweeted. They had no problem with the way that other people at this same enterprise tweeted, they just didn't like my own flavor of rhetorical panache. They never actually came out and said it was the subject matter of my tweeting, or my style, that got me a date with the guillotine. They simply said we told you to stop tweeting, you wouldn't, and so we are letting you go. I'm always fascinated when somebody else gets into...
Death is the one human experience that connects everyone, regardless of color, creed, class or bank account. The inequity comes only in its manner and timing. For Ted Flowers, my father, it came on a beautiful May morning, the day before Mother’s Day in 1982. It came after a year of agony, in the form of a brutal tumor in his lungs that had exploded into the farthest reaches of his battered, beloved body. He was a 43-year-old man who looked as if he’d lived twice that span. It would never occ...
Why should we be surprised that at a time when everything is supposed to be about race, from the skin color of certain newspaper editors forced to resign to whether we should capitalize the "B" in "Black," the most disturbing and consequential attack on our civic body in decades ends up being all about the color of the protesters/terrorists? After Wednesday's assault on the Capitol by desperate and angry Trump supporters, the conversation turned from "why did they do it?" to "who caused it?" to...
People might get tired of stories about my father Ted and his summer in Mississippi. They might roll their eyes when I, once again, write about how he faced hostility and the KKK during his time in the places that have become legendary for their ferocious efforts at silencing Black voices and votes. There are many out there who never heard of my father, but who are doing their damndest to make sure that people like him are silenced and forgotten. They are doing this because they have fallen...
It's rare that a simple tweet triggers in me the desire to write a column. On night three of the Republican National Convention last week, I had the great pleasure of watching Madison Cawthorne, a young paraplegic who is running for a house seat in North Carolina. At the very end of his short but moving address, this man – who is otherwise confined to a wheelchair – was helped out of that chair by two friends and stood. He was standing for the flag, for what it represents, for his fellow cit...
I am no longer surprised at the depths to which some people will sink in these fraught and tortured moments. A friend recently posted something on her Facebook page honoring the life and tragic death of Cannon Hinnant, the little 5-year-old from North Carolina who was shot through the head by his next-door neighbor. I also posted about the death, and made the child’s picture my social media profile photo. We both did it to call attention to the loss of another innocent to senseless, ubiquitous v...
I’ve been all over the place with Kamala Harris. Before Joe Biden picked her as his running mate, I was convinced that of all the possible choices, she was the most palatable. Harris has a lot of experience, is highly educated, is a P.R. genius and has fielded almost as much hate from the left as she has from the right. Her years as a prosecutor have put her on the wrong side of the law for Black Lives Matter activists and allies, so to say that the extremists on the far left aren’t happy is...
I’ve been pretty lucky in the name department. With the exception of that brief period when I hated the fact that “Christine” became a symbol for women who couldn’t keep their hair out of their faces and whispered before Congress about an alleged assault no one else could remember, I’ve never been ashamed to, as Beyonce sang, say my name. That’s why I feel so bad for women named Karen. It’s a lovely name, and I have some equally lovely female friends who share it. There is Karen from Pittsbur...
I wrote a column a short while back about teachers who didn’t want to go back to school until they could be guaranteed that everything was safe. The reaction to my suggestion that teachers shouldn’t demand absolute guarantees of safety, which is pretty much what they’ve been doing, made me think about other “essential” workers during this time of crisis, people who really have no other choice than to show up for work and hope that the gods and a competent Secretary of Health are protecting them....
My brother Jon was an exceptional human being. He had a sense of the world and life that alternated between skepticism, passionate embrace, disappointment, and hope that things would always move toward improvement, toward the light. And then, for reasons we won’t ever fully know, he turned off that light. He was only 30. There is music that won’t be written because of this, celebrations that were cancelled because of this, reunions that were smaller because of this, days that were sadder and...
Americans have a tendency to think we react well in emergencies. There is this sense we rise to the occasion, without whining and with that strength of character vouchsafed us from our immigrant ancestors. You only have to look at how the pioneers dealt with the dangers of the trek westward, the Depression-era folk who survived the Dustbowl and urban poverty, the Greatest Generation that willed themselves through World War II, and even a few more recent examples, like the reaction to 9/11 and th...
The pandemic has turned our world upside down. We work from home. School is cancelled indefinitely. Weddings, graduations, baptisms and all of the other indicia of the normal trajectory of a human life are suspended. This is what it must be like to be in Limbo, that now defunct Catholic state of existence without boundary, but also without God. The anxiety is real, palpable and weighs on all of us. On some, though, the weight is much heavier. There is a little girl who should have had no...
On Christmas day, Greta Gerwig’s updated version of the young adult classic “Little Women” opened in theaters to great acclaim, fantastic reviews and strong box office numbers. And yet, some women found fault with the fact that not enough men were flocking to see it. In a piece for the New York Times, writer Kristy Eldredge observed that the film hadn’t garnered a lot of award nominations from the Screen Actors Guild (zero) and the Golden Globes (two) and mentioned that the audiences seemed...
I never met my great-grandfather, although I've seen pictures of him. The one I treasure most is a family photo, similar to those images on an Ancestry.com commercial, where he is sitting with his wife and older daughters. (The sons would arrive later.) He's wearing a hat and a solemn expression, but you get the impression that he's content with the life he'd created since emigrating from Italy a few years before. You would be wrong, though. Some years after that photo was taken, this patriarch...
