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This whole thing, the pandemic and the reopening, all goes onto the scales at some point.

We Will Know For Sure If Reopening Was the Right Move. Someday.

By Jim Schutze

May 4, 2020

Maybe you know exactly what’s going on and what’s going to happen next. Not me. I don’t know jack. But let’s put down a marker right here at the beginning of the Great Texas Reopening. There will be an answer. It will be math. This isn’t French Impressionism. At a...

If someone from Colleyville went to work in a meat packing plant, it would be to write a novel about it.

Grim Calculus: Deaths for an Economy and Maybe Somebody's Reelection

By Jim Schutze

Apr 30, 2020

In the debate on opening up versus shutting down, a dark picture is emerging, with national ramifications but also with some nasty roots closer to home. A truly terrible political calculus may be afoot. The calculus would be this: that the nation will swallow the cost in human lives of...

Suburban Plano has been following the rules.

When Colleyville Gives Us the Finger, What Should We Give Colleyville Back?

By Jim Schutze

Apr 29, 2020

Now for the really weird part, the reopenings. What does reopening even mean? Who says? Reopen what? How? Then what? Why does this feel like Russian roulette? Wait. Is life Russian roulette? I have been thinking a lot about Colleyville, the affluent suburban community north of Dallas that has defiantly...

Jacob's House is a boarding house in Oak Cliff operated by the Well Community. The cat, named Skins, is a favorite boarder.

What the Most Needy Need Most In a Time of Separation – Each Other

By Jim Schutze

Apr 27, 2020

Yes, we need to pay special homage to first responders and medical personnel in this crisis, but there is another group of exposed persons out there risking their own health. I am thinking of clergy, nonprofit workers and volunteers who serve the least of our sisters and brothers. Any number...

If the government had a barn full of trillions of dollars it could give away whenever it felt like it, why didn't it tell us that a long time ago?

Crazy Money, Invisible Enemies, the Jitters: What You Need Is Some Cuomo

By Jim Schutze

Apr 22, 2020

I don’t know about you, but I need something to calm me down at the beginning of the day so I don’t start out already wired. My personal regimen is something I call “Cuomo in the morning.” And it’s not because I agree with everything that comes out of the...

The breadlines of the Great Depression are not unrelated to the car lines outside Fair Park last week, where thousands of people sought food for their families.

The Trend Line to Watch Is the Car Line Waiting Outside the Food Bank

By Jim Schutze

Apr 20, 2020

All of a sudden last week I was overcome by an eerie sensation, a feeling that I had been looking in the wrong direction for a month while something far more ominous than disease crept up behind. Hunger. We can withstand a pandemic. We won’t survive serious hunger. Not as...

Jason Whitely (left) interviews Dr. Robin Armstrong on my computer.

Problem With Channel 8 Miracle Drug Story Is Stupid News, Not Fake News

By Jim Schutze

Apr 16, 2020

My name is Jim Schutze. That’s it. Look again. No M.D. after the name, no Ph.D., not even an M.A. or an M.S. I’m working on the basis of a liberal arts bachelor’s degree from about 100 years ago, every syllable of which I have forgotten, gone, zap, sadly no...

Tommy Hogue and Lindsey Triplett as Will and Willy Lewis, who built the Aldredge House on Swiss Avenue between 1915 and 1917. Living history performances at the Aldredge House will begin again on the first Saturday of every month after the emergency.

Fear and the Virus Complicate Our Grief for a Guardian and Great Neighbor

By Jim Schutze

Apr 15, 2020

Thomas Hogue, age 75, my neighbor of 36 years, was a guardian of widows, talented actor and lover of local history. As a younger man, every year he erected a brightly lighted Christmas crèche scene on his front yard populated entirely by pink flamingos. Last Saturday he was found dead...

Bill Cawley, chairman of the Texas Real Estate Council, testifying at last week's online ad hoc Dallas City Council meeting to consider an eviction rights ordinance, suggested some tenants who ask for rent protection don't really need it.

Eviction Crisis, If It Happens Here, Will Be a Road Map for Everything

By Jim Schutze

Apr 13, 2020

No massive wave of evictions caused by the coronavirus has hit Dallas yet. Maybe it never will. But the threat of mass eviction is already becoming a template for everything else coronavirus, from unemployment to economic stagnation to mortality. If it happens, how big will it be? If it’s big,...

Dallas County continued to ramp up COVID-19-related restrictions over the weekend.

Dallas County COVID-19 Page Is Lousy, Funky, Hard to Use and no Surprise

By Jim Schutze

Apr 9, 2020

Local officials here are doing a lousy job providing us information about the pandemic. The Dallas County Health Department COVID-19 webpage looks like a DOS-based jigsaw puzzle from the 1990s. You don’t know what DOS was, right? My point exactly. (It was an early and now primitive computer operating system.)...

Black Dallas leaders fear that historical divisions of race will be mirrored in a disparate impact of COVID-19 deaths.

Dallas Black Leader Warns of Possible ‘Genocide’ Here Tied to COVID-19

By Jim Schutze

Apr 8, 2020

Last week two prominent African American voices in Dallas spoke to the particular threat that COVID-19 poses to the city’s minority poor community. What they said raises an unavoidable and ugly question: What if the two best ways to defend against the pandemic turn out to be being white and...

City Council member Adam Bazaldua, sheltering from home while fighting to keep tenants in their homes in Dallas.

Mayor Thinks Pandemic Is Challenging His Authority. Well, Yeah.

By Jim Schutze

Apr 6, 2020

When this is over, it will just be beginning. The global pandemic already is shaking the foundations of class, capitalism and nationhood all over the world. Some people see it. Some don’t. Here in Dallas, our mayor is an unfortunate example of don’t. According to the most recent population estimates...

If Life Gives You Coronavirus, Make Face Shields: Doing Good by Doing Good

By Jim Schutze

Apr 2, 2020

By now we are all sort of aware of the story of President Donald Trump and General Motors and the ventilator shortage. I haven’t quite kept up with the inner detail. There was a request for GM to manufacture ventilators and then a voluntary consent and then some kind of...

Berenice Deane comforts a recovering Wilbur the Pig.

A Happy Grandmother, a Poisoned Pig and What Weird Times Are These

By Jim Schutze

Apr 1, 2020

These are such strange times. They should be awful, and they are. We know it hasn’t hit yet, not the way it will. I don’t know about you, but I feel fear. But then I also feel something else — an inkling, but I’m not at all sure inkling of...

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the reigning hegemon of the Texas Senate

Dan Patrick, Show Us You Mean It. Give a Coronavirus Sufferer a Bath.

By Jim Schutze

Mar 26, 2020

Wait. Wait. Texas does not have to do a total, forever Fauci-style face-plant over Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. There is a respectable, even noble way out of this for us. True, it’s bad. Last week Patrick earned worldwide opprobrium for himself and terrible attention for Texas with what he said...

The Texas Supreme Court two weeks ago provided all local Texas courts with this "bench book" reminding them of law and procedure for coronavirus cases.

There Are Laws About Quarantine, but This Time Won’t Be Like Ebola

By Jim Schutze

Mar 23, 2020

Norman Siegel, a prominent New York civil rights lawyer who won a well-publicized victory on Ebola quarantines three years ago, has a new message. This is different. I talked to him last week because his quarantine victory in 2017 had an indirect connection with the 2014 Dallas Ebola scare, which...

If National Guard helicopters brought any COVID-19 test kits out to the Grand Princess, Jim Anderson and his wife never saw them.

Dallas Couple in 20-Day Quarantine Counts on Patience, Perseverance

By Jim Schutze

Mar 19, 2020

Jim Anderson and his wife are living in what could be described as a very well-run, nicely appointed, accommodating, fairly friendly minimum security prison in San Antonio. They can leave their small suite at will to walk the grounds, but the area where they are allowed to walk is surrounded...

In 2005, President George W. Bush declared bird flu a bigger threat than terrorism. In this country anyway, the pandemic never happened.

Can We Overreact? And Other Questions Nobody Wants to Talk About.

By Jim Schutze

Mar 18, 2020

By now you have seen X-many lists of answers to all the questions people are asking. So I thought I’d work on a list of answers to questions people are not asking. These are questions people may not want to ask because they fear the questions may not be politically...

If They Could Just Shut Up About Don’t Panic, That Alone Might Help a Little Bit

By Jim Schutze

Mar 16, 2020

If I could have one wish, which I can’t, it would be that people would stop telling me not to panic. Panic is a personal matter. I don’t need public officials or editorial writers telling me whether to panic or not. And, by the way, nothing they say is going...

Dale Davenport admires a certain architectural model he came across last year in the offices of developers Matthews Southwest. The South Dallas Fair Park PID (noted on model) is a special taxing district Davenport helped create, now taken over by a Matthews-run nonprofit.

What’s Good for the Car Wash Is Good for South Dallas, and That’s Really Bad

By Jim Schutze

Mar 12, 2020

The wolf is at the door in South Dallas. The very near future could see massive dispossession and displacement there to dwarf the city’s long, ugly history elsewhere of dispossession and displacement. The elected leadership of South Dallas not only will fail to raise a hand to protect it. They...

Schutze

Park Friends Group Wants To Be Development Czar Along the River

Coronavirus Science Is Not an Election for God's Sake

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