Today's Opinions

I don’t watch much television but the other day I was literally waiting for paint to dry so I decided to check out the offerings on the Saturday afternoon tube. Now the programming hasn’t changed in over 30 years, so there were no surprises there, but I noticed something interesting in the ads. Many of these were portraying an America still engrossed in social oneupsmanship — get a bigger lawn tractor than your neighbors’, buy seven golf shirts so you have a different one for each day of the week, and so on.

‘Hayseed” and other put-down terms generally get showered on rural folk by us urbanites. We’ve looked at people from neighboring towns as rustics, while we, in the big city of Las Vegas, are urban sophisticates.

Basketball teams arriving from any of the small schools that once dotted northern New Mexico in the ‘50s had funny ways of handling the ball, or cheering. Our teams, on the other hand, the epitome of sauvity, knew all the LeBron James moves, even before LeBron was conceived (of).

It’s an old story, but with a new twist. In 2007, nearly two-thirds of the employees at Alta Vista Regional Hospital voted to unionize, with District 1199 of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees representing their interests at the bargaining table. But Alta Vista’s parent company, Community Health Systems, has refused to sit down with the union, and raised legal objections at every turn in an attempt to usurp the election results.