I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Take a mysterious white powder. Add an envelope. Then deliver it to the office of the New Mexico governor.
Suddenly you have a full-blown incident on your hands, as we saw Thursday in Santa Fe when the state Capitol was evacuated and more than a dozen people were quarantined after potential exposure to the substance.
Tests came back negative on the powder for chemical agents or anthrax late Thursday night, similar to the finding in other states this week where other governors also received the mysterious white powder.
Given the harmlessness of the substance, some people might ask if the state’s response was overkill or was commensurate to the threat.
For me, the deeper question is whether the overwhelming response represents the new normal?
If so, is the new shock-and-awe response an acknowledgement that the unthinkable can still happen?
“It is still a threat. It just wasn’t a deadly agent,” state public safety spokesman Peter Olson said Friday morning of the white powder.
You’ll get no argument from me.
As I called Olson and others Thursday to get the latest on what was happening at the Roundhouse, memories of an autumn seven years ago in Connecticut intruded, muddying that common experience reporters have of preparing for the unlikely, worst scenario and of betting it’s another false alarm based on years of experience.
Turns out, the hunch was correct. But ever since Thanksgiving week 2001, I have a healthy respect for the unlikely’s becoming real, to the point that it sometimes trumps all those years of reacting to yet another false alarm.
That shift came seven years ago as I was sitting in a newspaper office in Naugatuck, Conn. I recall thinking at the time how nice it would be to have a few days off for Thanksgiving after reporting on the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their devastating effect on Connecticut, which lost dozens of residents to that tragedy.
My reverie didn’t last long. News came an hour or so later that a local hospital had diagnosed a 94-year-old woman who lived about five miles from me as having anthrax. ANTHRAX?!!!! I’d read about the disease in the context of the attacks in Florida, Washington, D.C. and New York, but had filed it all away as something I’d likely not have to deal with on the assumption that chance was on my side. How much bad luck could befall one state after all?
Less than 24 hours later the woman was dead, the fifth victim of what we now recall as the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The six weeks following her death are a blur. I remember interviewing the woman’s neighbors, her relatives, state and federal health officials, local doctors, firefighters and emergency medical technicians, as federal epidemiologists and investigators fanned out across Connecticut to piece together how she had contracted what was for all intents and purposes a disease that had been wiped out in the Western Hemisphere by modern medicine. I have written before about my personal experiences during that time, so I won’t go into too much detail.
What I will say is that that woman’s death taught me that my sense of what was likely and what was not had shifted irrevocably. I think as a country we have learned the same lesson. Which is why we saw what we did Thursday at the state Capitol.
