Tag Archives: DFW

local news

I am ‘home’ for keeps

A friend asked me a question I have been asked many times since moving to Texas in the spring of 1984.

“Do you plan to move back to Oregon at any time?” the question came. I answered my pal the same way I have answered it many times before.

“My short answer is no,” I said. He wanted to know why.

“It’s too expensive there,” I said. I have watched real estate prices climb into the heavens in the state of my birth and I have determined I cannot afford to live there.

Plus, I told my friend, my wife Kathy Anne and I moved to Texas to advance my journalism career. We were successful in (a) allowing my career to proceed and provide me with some modest success along the way and (b) carving out a great life in three vastly different regions of this massive state.

We moved to the Golden Triangle, then to the Panhandle, and then to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Each region provided us with great joy, a bit of culture shock and the move to the D/FW area put us close to our granddaughter, who tomorrow celebrates her 12th birthday.

All of this is my way of saying out loud that although I have proven to be an adaptable fellow, I still am able to sink my roots deeply into whatever terrain where I am living. I have done so in the Lone Star State.

I am here likely for the duration.

national news

Protests too often become annoyances

One aspect of protests deserves a mention here.

It’s the element of disruption they cause to those of us who happen to get caught in the middle of them.

Donald J. Trump’s executive order banning refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries has prompted protests at airports and other transportation terminals around the nation.

I have just returned home from a five-day trip to the Pacific Northwest to wish my beloved uncle a happy 90th birthday.

While I was there the president issued that ridiculous, paranoid order banning refugees. What happened, then, at Portland International Airport? Protesters clogged the place. They carried signs. They yelled at security officials. They made nuisances of themselves!

Other protests broke out all across the country. People marched in the streets.

When I left PDX this morning en route to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, I didn’t encounter any protesters at my point of departure. I thought there might be a horde of ’em at DFW. There weren’t. Good deal.

I got to my next connection to Amarillo and arrived quietly at the terminal.

My point, though, is that protests are fine. We are a country founded by protesters, people who didn’t like taking orders from monarchs. Those good folks then set about to build a government in The New World that guarantees people the right to assemble peaceably to “see redress of grievances” from the government.

It didn’t necessarily suggest they could disrupt the flow of life’s activities for the rest of us who choose to keep our protesting to ourselves.

Just so you know, I detest what the president has done. It’s in-American. For all I know it might even be unconstitutional. I’ll let the legal scholars of the world decide that one.

As for marching at airports, train stations and ship terminals … well, I’ll leave that for others.

Just stay out of my way. Please.