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Facing Race in Dallas: survey results on racial attitudes and provocative conversation

I got to spend the morning up at the Anatole with some really smart people. The occasion was a panel discussion sponsored by the Embrey Family Foundation and Dallas Faces Race; it was a kickoff to the big Facing Race conference going on in Dallas this week.

I had the privilege of moderating a panel made up of civil rights pioneer Benjamin Zelenko, Race Forward President Rinku Sen, state District Judge Tonya Parker and Dallas attorney Sol Villasana. All four of these folks are rock stars, and the conversation was so interesting that I could have listened to them well into the evening.

Also a part of today’s events was the release of the official findings of a survey on racial attitudes in Dallas. The Embrey Family Foundation sponsored this work as well. (We editorialized on it here; you can see highlights of the survey here the full report here.) Our editorial board will be keeping readers up to date on how Embrey and Dallas Faces Race go forward to turn this research into some type of pilot advocacy program.

Among the interesting moments in this morning’s panel discussion was Sen’s remarks about the need to disrupt the status quo and organize in civil disobedience to bring about action. That sparked lively debate among the panelists about whether demonstrations are merely protests that “preach to the choir” or actually bring about change.

Earlier, Villasana had brought up the issue of Dallas schools that still bear the names of figures from the Confederacy as an example of racial insensitivity. (Eric Nicholson of the Dallas Observer had written about this just yesterday.) So Sen used this example to illustrate what she meant by disrupting the status quo – and at the same time provided a window into some of the discussion that will take place at the national Facing Race conference in the next few days.

She noted that a lot of parents whose children go, say, to DISD’s Robert E. Lee Elementary probably don’t like the name. But they are more likely to talk amongst themselves about the bias the name bestows rather than do anything official to try to change it. But what if not just one or two parents officially complained, but if parents organized and a majority wrote letters of protest? What if they started a petition drive? What if they picketed? What else might they do to make it uncomfortable for DISD to retain the name on the school?

In his piece on Unfair Park about the Robert E. Lee issue, Nicholson paraphrased trustee Mike Morath as saying that “he fields the name-change question from time to time but that he has higher priorities than scrubbing DISD of Confederate references, like improving students’ educational outcomes.”

If Morath had been at this morning’s discussion (and, in fact,  Supt. Mike Miles was) he would have heard a number of perspectives on why such a scrubbing should be a top priority.

A lot of passion built around the idea that implicit bias is at the heart of much of today’s discrimination. As Sen said, racism is, these days, unintentional, systemic and hidden – not individual, overt and intentional. To a white school trustee, scrubbing a Confederate reference probably seems like not a big deal, but to young people in the community who are learning the history of the Civil War, how does Lee’s name on a school building compute? Not in a positive way, for sure.

Judge Parker addressed implicit bias in another way. She noted that bias is about “leaning toward something.” It’s about forming opinions about others before they ever open their mouths. It’s about assigning weight and credibility without proof or foundation, just because of how you “register” someone or something just by their “being/existing.”

Whether you spend time with the survey I referenced above or thinking about some of the panelists’ ideas, I hope this blog post will expand the audience of people willing to challenge our own biases and attitudes.

Council member Philip Kingston has drafted a “naughty and nice” list on the Trinity toll road

An appropriately elvish Philip Kingston (David Woo/Staff)

Council member Philip Kingston has been working for some time to put together a comprehensive list of who does and doesn’t want to pour concrete between the Trinity River levees and call it a road.

Today, after exhaustive research, he issued that list.

It was a worthy effort, but most of the names won’t surprise you. I’m on it somewhere, an indication that this list isn’t a document of Dallas’ movers and shakers.

I’m sorry councilman, but the names that aren’t here are the important ones. These would be the heavy money interests that have a lot of weight in Dallas and who have quietly pushed this road. Who exactly? Hard to say exactly. They don’t wear sandwich boards.

So the question remains unsettled. Who wants this road? No. Who really wants this road? So much that the political weight always seems to swing back toward it. And why?

A colleague the other day pointed me to a story about some land being purchased in the Design District. “That’s why they want the road,” he said. He made a compelling case until I pulled up a map and said, but there’s a highway right there already, Stemmons, exits and everything. Why do you need another road?

Dunno. Reasons have shifted around. Always something new.

So, with that, jump for Kingston’s list of naughty and nice. For the record, I’m not that nice.

Continue reading →

Hard to see through the haze in U.S. deal with China on carbon emissions

Okay, there are a lot of colors on this chart, but the only two that really matter are the ones at the top, the purple line and the blue line, both of which are soaring skyward like the carbon emissions those lines represent. China (blue line) and the U.S. (purple) represent 45 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. If those two countries can stick to the agreement they reached this week to curtail emissions, it’ll mark a huge step forward for the environment and addressing the heat-trapping characteristics that make carbon the major culprit in global warming.

But it certainly seems that China can do better, faster. This agreement requires the United States to do better, faster by stepping up the pace of its carbon-emissions program. The U.S. has a target of cutting its 2005-level emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. The previous commitment was to cut existing emissions by 17 percent by 2020.  In short, it means the United States promised China it would speed the pace of emissions cuts.

What did President Barack Obama get in return from Beijing? China agreed to keep pumping out more and more and more and more carbon until 2030. That’s the year China has set as its peak emissions level, after which it will start cutting back. So the blue line above will level off soon and start to drop. The upward trajectory of the purple line will — just like the Energizer Bunny whose electronics, fur and batteries are almost certainly made in China — keep going and going and going.

Uh, golly. What an achievement.

We are supposed to be very enthusiastic about this, because without such an agreement, China would basically not commit to anything and would continue to pollute with reckless abandon until the end of the world (scheduled, I think, for sometime in 2031).

What irks me about this deal is that it means China will effectively get a pass on all of the unfair trade advantages its pollution policy entails. China gets to undercut American and other world manufacturers by underpaying its workers and ignoring even the most minimal environmental norms. The goods it produces certainly are cheap, but at what price?

China argues, as the chart below depicts, that on a per-capita basis, its carbon emissions remain far, far below those of the United States. Therefore, China argues, it should be allowed 15 more years of industrialization catch-up time before being forced to cut back. I kindasorta understand their point. But, sorry, not really.

How Josephus Weeks became a big fan of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas

Josephus Weeks and his attorney (DMN File)

There’s nothing like a secret financial settlement to change a man’s tune.

Josephus Weeks, nephew of Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan, took to our Viewpoints page with vim and vigor one month ago to accuse Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas of “ignorance, incompetence and indecency” in sending “a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay for treatment” home “with some antibiotics and Tylenol.”

He was angry. Holding nothing back. Determined to get to the bottom of “why my uncle’s initial visit to the hospital was met with such incompetence and insensitivity.”

“Until that day comes,” he vowed, “our family will fight for transparency, accountability and answers, for my uncle and for the safety of the country we love.”

Get all that? Transparency. Accountability. Answers.

When Weeks appeared with Jesse Jackson, I was inclined not to be cynical about his motives. Skeptical, sure. Cynicism, I do my best to avoid.

We’ll never know whether the secret settlement announced Wednesday included any of the things Weeks indicated he was so determined to get. The hospital has said it’s sorry, which is good. Clearly, someone (or someones) over there messed up. That was obvious from the start.

What the public will probably never know, thanks to the secret settlement, are the details of who said — and did — what to whom when Thomas Eric Duncan went to Presbyterian on Sept. 25.

We’ll never know exactly what he told the nurse who interviewed him. Did he say he had just arrived from Liberia? West Africa? Africa? Arkansas? What exactly was his temperature? What were his other symptoms? What did the nurse enter into the electronic record? Did he or she talk with the doctor who examined Duncan? What records did the doctor see? Who else talked with Duncan during his brief stay? On and on. All the finger-pointing, accusations and counter-accusations of the past month? They’ll just lie there. (What is the half-life of an implied racism accusation, anyway?)

We, the general public, will never know what went wrong in the case of Thomas Eric Duncan. Most likely, there’s no grand conspiracy. My guess is that the mistake was made by good, hard-working folks going about their business and getting through the day. Someone wasn’t paying enough attention at precisely the wrong moment. Maybe he or she was busy or distracted. Maybe the moment came at the end of a double shift. It could happen to any of us.

The hospital knows. The lawyers know. But we’ll never know if the details provide some way of ensuring another Thomas Eric Duncan doesn’t slip through the system. I don’t begrudge the Duncan family their settlement. They’ve suffered loss. I don’t even begrudge Duncan’s fiancée,  Louise Troh, her book deal. (Ain’t America great?)

As for Mr. Weeks, determined seeker of transparency, accountability and answers, well, he has apparently become a big fan of our local hospital.

“I believe this facility is an outstanding facility,” he says in our paper today. “If I got sick and Texas Presbyterian was close to me, I would go there and get treated for it.”

UPDATE: After this blog item was published, I was contacted by Wendell Watson, director of public relations at Presbyterian. He took issue of my characterization of the hospital’s efforts at transparency, and he disagreed with my assertion that the public might never know important details of Duncan’s treatment on Sept. 25.

“All of that information is out there,” he said. “We have been very transparent with it.”

He pointed me toward two documents issued on a section of the hospital system’s website.

One of the items is a lengthy Powerpoint, titled “The Ebola Response: Lessons and Changes.” Our own Sherry Jacobson detailed these lessons and changes in her story last month.

The second item is a transcript of comments made by Daniel Varga, chief clinical officer for Texas Health Resources, to a congressional committee on Oct. 16. The five-page statement contains two paragraphs of detail related to Duncan’s treatment:

“At 10:30 p.m. on September 25, Mr. Duncan presented to the Texas Health Dallas Emergency Department with a fever of 100.1°F, abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea, and headache — symptoms that could be associated with many other illnesses. He was examined and underwent numerous tests over a period of four hours.

“During his time in the ED, his temperature spiked to 103°F, but later dropped to 101.2. He was discharged early on the morning of September 26. We have provided a timeline on the notable elements of Mr. Duncan’s initial emergency department visit.”

That timeline of notable elements is not published with Vargas’ testimony, and Watson said he would check to see if it is available. If he provides it to me, I will share it here.

As for whether he could share further details or answer other questions about Duncan’s stay, Watson said that information will not be forthcoming.

“As a matter of fact, we made an agreement with the family that we won’t talk about Mr. Duncan’s treatment anymore,” he said. “We respected their wishes. The information we’ve already posted is still out there, but we’re not going to go into other details.”

New Dallas collections firm must not use payday lender for city fines

ACE Cash Express at Abrams and Skillman (David Woo/Staff)

UPDATE: An MSB spokesperson says the company will not use ACE for Dallas collections.

Original item: The bare-knuckle fight yesterday over who should win the city’s municipal courts fine collections contract is over. And I believe it came out the right way.

City staff has been under pressure for years to do a better job of bringing in more of what’s owed on city tickets.

The staff put together a bid proposal that got an aggressive guarantee of more than $21 million from the winnning firm, MSB.

The council voted 8-7 largely on racial lines, to give MSB the contract.

The loser was the politically connected law firm Linebarger, Goggan.

An effort by some to re-bid this deal was unfair to the bidder, unfair to taxpayers and unfair to staff.

That said, I learned this morning about something with MSB that concerns me and that the city must correct now.

MSB apparently steers some people it is collecting from into the arms of the giant of payday lending – ACE Cash Express.

Note the offer below from MSB’s website. If you want to pay your back due fine in person, where should you go? Why, ACE. You don’t need to be too bright to figure out what happens when an unsophisticated person gets inside ACE.

Many people who don’t, or can’t, pay their tickets are poor. There are options for people without means; municipal judges help them all the time. Poverty isn’t an excuse for escaping punishment for breaking the city’s laws.

Nevertheless, our city should not be anywhere involved in sending people to a payday lender. Dallas must insist that MSB not accept payments for municipal fines at ACE.

Who knows, that may spell the end of MSB’s contract. Fine. It isn’t worth doing business with MSB if our poor are put in even more danger by landing in the lap of a payday lender.

The collections business needs to be aggressive. The city’s laws, and its fines, need to be taken seriously. But not this way. Not after all we have tried to do to keep our residents away from these lenders.

Did political concerns drive council member Rick Callahan to call for breaking the backs of panhandlers

Dallas Council member Rick Callahan (second from right) (Mona Reeder/Staff Photographer)

Earlier this week, Dallas council member Rick Callahan went well over the line in his recommendations about how the city should treat panhandlers – saying “Break their backs, break their spirit — that’s the only way we’re going to win this battle.”

Presumably, by the time you’re standing on a street corner or in the median holding a sign with your hand out, your spirit is already fairly broken. Rare is the beggar filled with vim and vigor for life.

The comments were inappropriate, but I understood Callahan’s frustration. He represents Pleasant Grove, where panhandling doesn’t get the same level of attention that it might at, say, Preston Road and Walnut Hill.

On that basis, it seemed worth chalking this up to a bad moment for someone new to the public eye.

Unfortunately, that isn’t all that there is here.

WFAA’s Tanya Eiserer reported last night that Callahan may have had a major political motive not only for calling for a public crackdown but for quietly insisting police act against panhandlers in his district.

Callahan’s top political rival is Jesse Diaz, a longtime gadfly who has been known to cross a line or two himself.

According to Eiserer’s story, Callahan e-mailed Mayor Mike Rawlings, City Manager A.C. Gonzalez and Police Chief David Brown about Diaz.

In an e-mail with the subject line “my political opponent,” Callahan noted that Diaz was raising cane about panhandlers.

“He will use it as a guerilla tactic against my reelection candidacy. If we are unsuccessful in reigning this problem in, then this area may fall victim to the methods of this man and his poisonous rhetoric. He is not about solutions only the blame game. I need your full response and need it now to end this malaise that has fallen upon Southeast Dallas.”

Here’s where the line gets crossed in a major way. It’s okay to ask police to look into a panhandling problem in your district. That’s good representation.

It’s not okay to do it because you want to save yourself from a future campaign issue and keep your political opponent at bay.

Callahan can’t abide Diaz. He told me that he decided to run based largely, if not solely, on the fact that it looked like Diaz would win by default.

But if panhandlers are such a problem they deserve their backs broken, then Callahan should have been sending these e-mails long before Diaz used the issue to create a problem for him. That’s leadership instead of politics.

Coggins, Dershowitz, Ken Starr and Innocence Project counsel all rally to Rick Perry’s defense

I am just plain floored at the spectrum of lawyers who’ve signed on to a brief asking the judge in Gov. Rick Perry’s felony case to dismiss the charges.

Anytime you get Jeff Blackburn from the Innocence Project of Texas going to bat for this governor, something’s rotten in the court system. Add Paul Coggins and Alan Dershowitz as two others who’d normally be unlikely to ride to Perry’s defense.

The list goes on. This hasn’t been reported in our newspaper, so I may be filling a void here for some readers. You may want to know about this. Astounding.

Excerpt:

“Reasonable people can disagree on the political tactics employed by Governor Perry and his opponents. But to turn political disagreement into criminal prosecution is disturbing. To do so with an indictment riddled with constitutional infirmities is worse.”

And this:

“If Governor Perry is forced to endure a criminal trial, then the damage has already been done–even if he is ultimately acquitted. The mere knowledge that an indictment can be maintained would itself chill a vast spectrum of constitutionally protected political speech by other political officials.”

Talking Texas Legislature with NBC 5 crew

Dallas preservationist Virginia McAlester deserving of key to the city — and hero status

Virginia McAlester photographing details of a house at 4808 Drexel Dr. back in 2010. (File Photo)

We rail a lot, here and elsewhere, about failures in Dallas around preservation efforts. Today this space is reserved for a salute: Both to preservationist Virginia McAlester, who more than 40 years ago sparked the movement to save beautiful homes and commercial buildings in Dallas, and to City Hall for having the good sense to honor her today for her decades of work.

Colleague Rudy Bush notes that she received a real key to the city this morning from Mayor Rawlings — not the bogus kind that then Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway handed Michael Vick some years back.

McAlester’s accomplishments are too many for one blog post, but here’s a start:

– She led the fight to save Swiss Avenue in the 1970s, which produced the city’s first historical-protection ordinance.

– She was one of the 11 founding members of Preservation Dallas, established in 1972 as the Historic Preservation League. Among its first preservation work was caring for the historic art deco buildings in Fair Park.

– She chaired the Historic Dallas Fund, which raised the money to buy 23 dilapidated houses in Munger Place and served as a catalyst to bring that neighborhood back as well.

– She’s a  nationally recognized expert on residential architecture who, in 1984, published A Field Guide to American Houses, which she updated about a year ago.

Among the best pieces about Ms. McAlester, her life in Dallas and her awesome legacy is this February piece by Thomas Korosec in the DMN.

Like so many of our true female heroes in Dallas, Texas and beyond, Ms. McAlester hasn’t made a lot of big headlines. She’s never been about grabbing the spotlight. Looking through DMN clips, I found that more often than not she shows up as part of thoughtful teams doing important work.

I’ve argued for years that one reason we haven’t yet had a female Texan of the Year is because women so often lead in ways that don’t create a big buzz or fit into a neat one-year time frame. Female problem solvers and team builders go about their work quietly as they make a big difference year after year.

Ms. McAlester is a prime example of someone with those attributes. What a well-deserved honor!

Give Dallas construction workers a break

Claudia Golinelli (right in helmut) listens as pastor Owen Ross from Christ Foundry United Methodist Church prays during a vigil to protest the contracts that the city has with construction companies that do not provide for adequate rest breaks (Nathan Hunsinger/The Dallas Morning News)

It’s difficult to understand why people need to argue for an ordinance like this. But construction workers in Dallas are having to ask for a law requiring that they get breaks for rest and water.

This is hard labor, outdoors, and people must have the chance to take a break.

One woman, a mother of two and an electrician, told the council today they she can’t even get the time to go to the restroom some days. These aren’t people who don’t want to work. They aren’t lazy. They work constantly. The construction firms that employ them should be ashamed that their workers are standing before the Dallas City Council asking for a few minutes to get a drink of water.

We complain about the burden of regulation. Regulation is almost always responsive, not anticipatory. Here’s a case where government might have to step in because employers didn’t do what they should have done in the first place – give people a break. If you work at McDonalds or Walmart, you get a chance to rest. You work in the sun on a roof in the Texas summer, maybe not.

That’s got to stop someway, somehow.

The net neutrality fight takes another turn

The Federal Communications Commission headquarters in Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama called for the "strongest possible rules" to protect the open Internet, advocating stricter controls than a regulator he appointed. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg )

The Internet is a great equalizer. Whether you own a start-up company looking for exposure or operate a Fortune 500 company with deep pockets, the Internet narrows the chasm.

This is the core argument of net neutrality proponents and of President Obama, who says he favors unfettered equal access. Opponents want to add toll lanes to the Internet Superhighway and beg to differ.

The devil is the details. It also matters where you sit ideologically and financially.

If you’re Verizon, for instance, you want to manage your network, even tolling the biggest users and giving slower network access to the smaller content providers.

If you’re Texas Sen.Ted Cruz, you tweet “Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.”

If you’re Google, Facebook or Netflix, you worry about possible tolls and one company’s content being favored over another firm’s offering.

Once small guys looking for a chance, Google, Facebook and Netflix now are giants. So when push comes to shove, which side of the debate will they now support? Also the FCC itself has given conflicting signals about which route it would take.

A federal court struck down the FCC’s previous attempts to establish net neutrality rules, and despite the president’s desires, it isn’t clear that net neutrality will mean absolute equal access. Content is being degraded and network performance altered right now. That impacts the quality of Internet content consumers are buying.

This battle is far from over. How to prevent network giants from controlling the market through the amount of bandwidth they utilize is yet another issue. And is it really a problem if the providers of the “best,” i.e., most desired content, get a VIP entrance to the network as long as everyone else is allowed in a acceptable service levels?

This much is certain. The Internet must not ever resemble the old Ma Bell, a single provider pipe that restricted access and innovation.

A general tells the unvarnished truth, at last, about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan


The op-ed in today’s New York Times by retired Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger is one of the most refreshing pieces I’ve read in years about our military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Bolger, the mission was most definitely not accomplished. He bluntly states that these two wars amounted to a defeat.

These are difficult words, but words we all need to hear and read. Because another war beckons. Islamic State jihadists are doing everything in their power to lure the United States back into a ground war in Iraq and Syria, and some hawkish U.S. politicians are taking the bait. They want U.S. ground troops to assume a combat role, which, coincidentally, is exactly what Islamic State wants.

First of all, Borger debunks the “legend” that the 2007-2008 surge in Iraq was a success. At best, Borger says, it bought U.S. commanders time and allowed them to “feel better about ourselves.” But it was not a success.

“The surge legend is soothing, especially for military commanders like me. We can convince ourselves that we did our part, and a few more diplomats or civilian leaders should have done theirs. Similar myths no doubt comforted Americans who fought under the command of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War or William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam. But as a three-star general who spent four years trying to win this thing — and failing — I now know better,” he writes.

To have any chance of prevailing in another guerrilla war, first and foremost, America must know the enemy it’s fighting. Understand their motivation. And if our forces don’t adapt to the battlefield the jihadists are fighting on, we will lose.

“As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan. The American people had never signed up for that,” Borger writes.

Unless we as a country understand what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan — a sort of lessons-learned introspection and self-critique — we would be fools to get involved in yet another ground war against this same type of enemy. Because it is a certainly we will keep making the same mistakes, possibly with even more tragic results this time than in the other two wars.

Borger recommends correctly that an independent, nonpartisan commission be established to conduct an inquiry similar to what the 9/11 Commission did.

Finally, he says we might have to accept that there is no such thing as victory in a war like this. We might have to accept that the best outcome we can hope for as a nation is to keep the jihadists busy, constantly attacking and degrading their capabilities but perhaps never completely snuffing them out or expecting to hear them declare, “We surrender!” It’s not going to happen, especially with an enemy that views war timelines in terms of centuries, not days, months or even years.

No, it won’t give us the legends of glory America enjoyed at the end of World War II. “But in the real world,” Borger writes, “it just may well give us something better than another defeat.”

Finally, impeachment time for Obama: This guy chews gum

Screenshot of "developing news" story on CNN, Tuesday, Nov. 11.

I was willing to tolerate the outrages of Benghazi, the rollout of Obamacare, the booming stock market, the declining unemployment rate, and the constant drone of good news about the economy, but after seeing this important developing story on CNN today, I’ve about had it with President Barack Obama. America, we cannot tolerate a president who walks and chews gum. Thank goodness we now have a Republican-controlled Congress that can do something about this man and stop him before he chews again.

New community loan center can help lead Dallas residents away from payday lenders

Dallas council member Jerry Allen

The payday loan industry has stripped who knows how many hard-earned dollars out of the pockets of our city’s poor.

Usurious rates and fees are their trick. And, sure, people “choose” to use these services. Not much of a choice in most cases. The car breaks down, you’ve got to get to work. The rent is due, you’ve got to pay the landlord.

Nobody has fought this industry’s abuses harder than Dallas council member Jerry Allen, the Lake Highlands boy with an old Dallas drawl.

On Wednesday, Allen will announce his latest effort, and it’s a good one.

The city will work with the Business and Community Leaders of Texas to create a new Community Loan Center of Dallas. The center will have employers help provide small-dollar loans with far lower interest rates than what people see at the payday and title loan stores.

These programs have had some success. The Community Loan Center of Texas offers loans of up to $1,000 with an 18 percent interest and a 12-month payback period.

In the Rio Grande Valley, the CLC has made 200 loans with just a five percent loss rate.

Is this going to put payday lenders out of business. No. But it will help some hard-working people get out of its grips. And it can help them build the credit they need to stay out of it. That’s a great start.

Lots of people who call themselves leaders like to make a splash with a big announcement. For years, Allen has been working quietly (and not so quietly when needed) on the problem of predatory lending.

This latest effort deserves all the support he can get.

Banning smoking in Dallas parks and trails is a no-brainer

Atlanta is one of the many southern cities to ban smoking in its parks. (File Photo)

Glad to see the news that Dallas is taking steps to lose its dubious distinction of being only one of two top 10 U.S. cities that still allow smoking in city parks.

Dallas city staff has begun drafting an ordinance to prohibit smoking on trails and in parks, which would include many of the large youth sports complexes, such as the one at Crawford Park in southeast Dallas.

What kind of scope are we talking about? According to the City of Dallas website: 381 parks and 125 developed trail miles.

Phoenix is the other city in the top 10 without a ban. Houston just jumped on this good-health bandwagon and is going big — with fines of up to $2,000.

I’m a frequent runner on the Santa Fe and White Rock trails and can vouch for the unpleasantness of passing someone who is walking along puffing on his or her cancer stick. I don’t think it does me any permanent harm, but, wow, it’s enough to make me puke. Would love to see all those hard-working police officers on bikes force the smokers off the path.

Many smokers will see a ban as another attack on their rights — right about now, they are muttering “if you can’t smoke outside, where can you smoke”?

Smoking is a person’s right — as long as tobacco is legal. But the rights of many in some cases indeed do trump the rights of one. City parks would be a good example of where the rights of the many should prevail — especially when so many of them are children and youth. Here are some of what seem to me as common-sense reasons to prohibit lighting up in parks:

– What are parks intended for if not promoting good health? There’s just something inherently wrong in the mixed message of smoking and recreation.
– Don’t our youngest residents deserve the cleanest possible environment for their play? And don’t we want better role modeling for them?
– Not to mention that underage smokers, who didn’t legally purchase those cigarettes, are often among the offenders. A ban gives them one fewer place to smoke without getting caught by their parents.
– Cigarette butts are not the worst offender among litter at our city parks, but they end up on the ground often enough to be a headache for park crews.
– I’ve left the health concerns to last on the list because I know critics will say you can find a study that supports most anything. But a multitude of those studies contend that “sitting 3 feet away from a smoker outdoors can expose you to the same level of secondhand smoke as if you were sitting indoors with a smoker.”

This change shouldn’t cause a lot of hang-wringing over at City Hall. Again, the surprise is that we haven’t already taken such a stand. According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, 990 communities have specified that their city parks be smoke-free. And this doesn’t include all those that have some imposed some type limit.

Will be eager for the park board to take up city staff recommendations and see how quickly we can improve the quality of our park experiences.

What am I missing? Would love to hear ideas from readers, both pro and con, as I try to form the most persuasive arguments.

City Council member Rick Callahan on panhandlers: “Break their backs, break their spirit — that’s the only way we’re going to win this battle.”

Where's the compassion? (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times/MCT, File)

Panhandling isn’t always a matter of choice. It is a necessity for many. Not everyone holding a sign is scam artist. People can be down on their luck. Statistics show that some are veterans – people who served this country and have had a difficult time re-entering society.

I was shocked when I read this item from todays’ Quality of Life Committee meeting quoting Dallas City Council member Rick Callahan and some of his colleagues calling for greater enforcement of the city’s panhandling ordinance.

Callahan called panhandlers “nonconformists” and compared them setting down belongings to dogs urinating on cars. He told police officers he did not care if there were higher priority crimes happening, he wanted the panhandlers ticketed and jailed as many times as it took.

“Break their backs, break their spirit — that’s the only way we’re going to win this battle,” he said.

Panhandling is a city blight and some panhandlers are dangerous. People on the edge of existence or suffering from mental disorders or drug problems can be threatening.

But where is the compassion? I don’t consider myself to be a bleeding heart, but I do ask the question, lots of us ought to be asking: “Except for the grace of God, so go I.”

There are times I’ve given to panhandlers and times I haven’t. I’ve seen older men dressed in a clean shirt and tie. My  immediate reaction is they were once comfortable before being corporate downsized. And I’ve seen others, whose spirit has already been broken several times over.

Lots of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, which can put them dangerously close to resorting to begging. Lots of veterans can’t get basic help. Others have turned their backs on help. But the last thing I want to be is callously judgmental. As human beings, we ought to be better than that.

Vince Young’s return to UT and how he might help school ‘change the world’

Vince Young after the University of Texas' 2006 Rose Bowl victory. (DMN Staff Photo)

The first couple of times I saw this headline in my Twitter feed — former UT quarterback Vince Young’s “Why I came back to UT”– I rolled my eyes so dramatically that I gave myself a headache. I sarcastically pointed out to my cat, who happened to be the only breathing creature in proximity, that “we all know why Vince Young is back at Texas — his post-Longhorns career was a massive train wreck. Where else would he go but back to the Forty Acres?”

Understand that writing the words Vince Young and train wreck in the same sentence is difficult. He brought me and my family some of the greatest memories of the aughts, culminating with the moment pictured above. Heck, we even named our cat “Vince,” after the UT quarterback.

So the third time the op/ed, which appears on the Texas Tribune site, popped up in my feed, I decided I owed it to Vince to give it a read. I’m glad I did.

Young writes about what he hopes to accomplish in his work for the university’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. This is part of the school’s efforts to help first-generation college students succeed, a program we editorialized about favorably here.

The fact is that Vince Young understands what it’s like to be a first-generation student or someone from a low-income background. He writes candidly about peers back at home who didn’t necessarily respect the decision to try to succeed in the academic part of the university experience.

People who might not take seriously what their high school guidance counselor or youth minister tells them about college will be a lot quicker to listen to Young. He can speak meaningfully from his experience — with equal shares of success and failure — about college. And he can do it in a way that will make young people listen.

When the New York Times wrote persuasively about the issue of “Why Gets to Graduate?” last May, it noted the need for peer role-models. Bill McKenzie provided a Texas perspective on this story in this free-lance piece he wrote for Points last summer.

I’m so glad that I quit my eye-rolling (never an open-minded response) and instead got Vince’s message. If he works as hard on this effort as he worked on the collegiate football field, his post-pigskin legacy will indeed “change the world.”

Cristela — A Dallas backdrop and new faces of color emerge on television

A new demographic is emerging on television (AP Photo/ABC, Adam Taylor)

I grew up in a pre-Cosby Show era of very few faces of color in prominent roles on television.

Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons broke barriers, but not necessarily stereotypes. Later came shows like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. By then, my non-news interests had turned to HBO-stuff and sporting events.

There’s a new demographic emerging on television, and I like it. It is the willingness of writers to explore African-American and Hispanic storylines from those perspectives.

Black-ish, with Anthony Anderson, is a comedic glimpse into what it means to be middle- or upper middle class and African-American, wanting more for your children while worried that they’ll not fully understand the sacrifices of previous generations. Cristela, written by Cristela Alonzo, the first Mexican-American woman to create, produce, write and star in her own primetime comedy, explores themes of family and the American Dream from an Hispanic perspective.

Cristela is especially interesting because the show isn’t set in Los Angeles or New York.  Alonzo was born and grew up in south Texas. Her namesake character on the show lives and works in Dallas as an ambitious, educated six-year law school student who is trying to grab an internship and hopefully carve career at a prestigious law firm. We see familiar buildings and the Dallas skyline, and hear Tony Romo and Jerry Jones references. Mark Cuban has filmed an episode playing himself.

Both shows are loaded with references that you’ll only fully appreciate if you are Hispanic or African-American, which gives both an endearing code language beneath the actual words of the script. Many of the themes are universal, and some shows are formulaic. The ethnic spin makes these more than just another comedy.

Of course, the biggest change is Thursday night, which belongs to Shonda Rhimes, the Chicago-born screenwriter and producer who is the creative thrust behind Greys Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder.

The shows air back-to-back-to-back, and the latter two are edgy dramas that just a few years ago might have been too edgy for cable. Most of all, they offer outlets for the considerable acting chops of Kerry Washington and Viola Davis, whose weekly performances are simply amazing. While the shows often can be confusing and logic-defying, the lead characters are powerful, flawed, complex African-American women who transition between heroine and villain every episode.

Shows like Saturday Night Live continue to struggle to pull off comedic bits involving minorities that aren’t stereotypes or paper thin. Right now, I’m enjoying what I am seeing elsewhere.

America, get over your Iraqaphobia because more U.S. trainers must be deployed

A fighter of the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) holds a position behind sanbags during fighting against Islamic State (IS) group on November 7, 2014 in the Syrian besieged border town of Ain al-Arab (known as Kobane by the Kurds). Turkey is pursuing a delicate but dangerous strategy after allowing peshmerga fighters to transit its soil to Kobane, fearing Kurdish domination of northern Syria but also risking the collapse of the peace process with Turkish Kurds. (AFP PHOTO / Ahmed Deeb)

Americans are understandably suffering from Iraqaphobia. Once bitten by this spider, twice shy. But we’ve got to get over it and understand that the deployment of U.S. troops to Iraq for training purposes is absolutely the least of our long-term worries.

Don’t believe for a second that Islamic State jihadists are somehow being pushed back into retreat. For them, this is a fight to the death, and unless Iraqi forces stand up to them and take their country back, Iraq will split completely apart, with a Shiite south and Kurdish northeast in perpetual battle against an Islamic State government ruling the middle and west. That is an intolerable outcome.

Why not just let them slaughter each other? Because Islamic State jihadists will not be content just with the territory they’ve seized in Syria and Iraq. They see their battle as an eternal one that will not end until they have restored Muslim control over the expanse of the former Ottoman Empire. And there’s no guarantee they would stop there.

Theirs is the worst kind of coercive, perverted interpretation of Islam in which death or torture is the only answer for anyone who disagrees with them.

If the Islamic State is allowed to solidify its foothold in Iraq, the group will absolutely move on to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. I’m sure they have Israel on their radar screen as well.

There is no option for America to sit this one out. A commitment of 3,000 U.S. troops to perform training of Iraqi forces is not a steep price to pay in order to retake lost territory and restore governance to a Sunni region gone wild. It is the job of Iraqis to conduct the ground battle and defend their own country. To send extra trainers and help them accomplish the tast is hardly mission creep. It’s mission assurance, because the alternative — capitulation to the Islamic State — is simply too nightmarish to contemplate.

How many people are riding the Orange Line to the airport?

An American Airlines flights taxis in the background as a DART Orange Line train pulls in to the new station Monday, Aug. 18, 2014 at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, G.J. McCarthy)

A couple of women squeezed on my southbound DART train this morning pulling rollaway suitcases behind them. As the rest of us were headed to work, these two were on their way to board a plane at DFW’s Terminal A. I’d say they looked happier than the others on the train.

The thought occurred: With the airport service now more than two months old, time for a ridership update.

I emailed DART’s Morgan Lyons this morning, and here’s what he said back:

“It’s a little over 1,000 a day last I heard. The projection was 1,200 after a year, so we’re happy with the way it has developed.”

Point of clarification: DART counts passengers as they get ON the train. These two DFW-bound passengers were counted when they boarded at Lovers Lane, and that’s it.

If they take a taxi or get a ride back home, their use of DART to reach the airport will not be  reflected in DART’s passenger count. I suppose it might balance out, but it might not, depending on people’s routines.

And this further from Morgan:

“We’re seeing lots of employees, which is good. We’re also seeing a lot of what you reported, people a good distance from the airport riding the train with luggage.”

The early guess from DART chief Gary Thomas and others was that most passengers on the Orange Line to the airport would be workers. With 60,000 on-site workers, the airport is a huge employment center unto itself — about half the workforce of downtown.