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Opinion
Page 4
Sunday, January 6,2013
Ennis Daily News
ERM s future
health key to
city s strength
Ennis Regional Medical Center, working
under interim leadership in the wake of
former CEO Dave Anderson’s departure in
November, has its path clear now after an
announcement made by parent company
LifePoint.
ERMC and Parkview Regional Hospital
in Mexia will now be jointly led by the na-
tive chief financial officer of ERMC, Jack
Wilcox, and the chief executive of
Parkview, Kevin Zachary
The decision comes at a vital point for
the hospital. In recent years, nods from the
Joint Commission and various industry
recognitions have ele-
vated the hospital’s star
among health care peers,
and making the transi-
tion from outgoing lead-
ership to a new system in
the new year was a vital
part of keeping confident
growth under way
We’re glad stability for
the local facility, which includes the city’s
local emergency room resources, has been
imparted through this decision. We’re in-
terested to see how the operations of both
hospitals change moving into the new
scheme of leadership, but expect LifePoint
has made the choice with full knowledge of
the requirements in front of both its facili-
ties. Rural hospitals, such as ERMC and
PRH, have to innovate to stay competitive
as new healthcare paradigms become real-
ity and combining leadership could have a
positive effect on both facilities. Only time
will tell how the change works out.
One thing is certain for Ennis. Ennis Re-
gional plays a central part in the commu-
nity’s ongoing growth process. The services
offered through the facility which offers 60
beds of acute-care space, are of irreplace-
able support in both providing healthcare
and anchoring economic development here.
Without the safety net that a professional
health care community can provide, indus-
trial and commercial expansion is just not
possible.
With the continued growth of the private
sector in our town, the community’s best
interests lie in the continued health and sta-
bility of our local hospital.
Write to us!
The Ennis Daily News encourages readers to submit let-
ters to the editor about local issues that interest them.
All submissions should include the writer’s name, city
of residence and daytime phone number for verification.
Anonymous letters will not be published and the editor
reserves the right to edit or refuse publication of any letter.
You can mail your letter to The Ennis Daily News, PO
Box 100, Ennis, 75120; fax it to us at 972-875-9747; email us
at editor@ennisdailynews.com or you can bring it by the of-
fice located at 213 N. Dallas St.
The opinions expressed by our readers may not neces-
sarily reflect the position of the Ennis Daily News.
© Contents copyright 2013 and cannot be reproduced
without the written permission of the publisher.
Tre Bischof ■ Publisher Michelle Crouch ■ Advertising Manager
Nick Todaro ■ Editor Teresa Watson ■ Office Manager
Ferney Parra ■ Production Manager
Tico Montemayor ■ Circulation Director
Melissa Honza ■ Composition Manager
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Resolutions for Ennis
Each year, many of us try to
make New Year’s resolutions. By
Jan. 6, many of ours have already
been broken thanks to
human nature.
Since I’m like many
of you and unable to
hold on to my resolu-
tions - except 1996
when I didn’t each
chocolate for 365 days
— I’ve decided to
make a few resolu-
tions for Ennis and
the rest of Eastern
Ellis County.
• Shop local: For a
variety of reasons,
small town newspa-
pers like this one beat
the drum of promoting local
shopping to death each Christmas
season. This is something I’d like
to see us do year round. A grass-
roots attempt to get local people to
shop locally called the 3/50 Proj-
ect is something this newspaper
will promote in 2013 to help guide
shoppers to their neighborhood
stores for what they need.
All you have to do is choose
three local stores to spend $50 in
each month. The point is to
choose three businesses that you
may not frequent monthly right
now and support them the entire
year. If every adult in our market
area participated, that would
pump nearly $26 million into the
local community. Expecting
everyone to take part is unrealis-
tic, but I think if some of us got
on board, spread the word and re-
alized how conceivable it is for us
to do more than that.
Statistics providing by The
3/50 Project show that 68 percent
of all money spent at a local re-
tailer remains in the
community. Shopping
with a national chain
will only keep 43 per-
cent at home. If we
can generate an addi-
tional $26 million from
this initiative, we can
keep $6.5 million at
home.
Keep in mind these
are not guaranteed
numbers, obviously.
But you get the point.
There are tangible rea-
sons to shop locally.
Believe me, saving 15
cents on a grocery item will not be
worth losing 25 percent of our
take.
You might wonder how you
benefit from a local company.
First, local thriving businesses
give back to the community at a
greater clip than a national chain.
These owners and their employ-
ees are members of our churches,
schools and civic organizations.
Some chain managers get how im-
portant local ties are, but they are
few and far between.
Take it from someone involved
on some level in nearly all local
non profits, churches promotions,
civic groups and clubs, the local
people are the true givers in our
community.
• The second resolution I’d like
to promote is staying positive.
Anyone who knows Ennis resi-
dent Gil Escobar or who don’t
know him but just watch his face-
book posts, knows POSITIVE is
the No. 1 message from Gil. I’ve
never asked him about this but I
know it makes others understand
what he’s trying to get across. No
matter what issues you are deal-
ing with, remaining positive is a
remarkably effective tool to en-
hancing the mood and attitude of
those around you. Most commu-
nities could use that.
While I’m not singing kumbaya
at my keyboard while writing this
column, a little positive energy
isn’t all that bad. I may seem a bit
hypocritical since I’m working in
an industry that jokes, “If bleeds,
it leads.” Believe me, considering
some of the unusual language we
take if someone doesn’t get their
FREE newspaper on Tuesday I
think some of our neighbors
could surely use some positive re-
inforcement. Maybe I’ll see if
Gil’s interested in writing a col-
umn for us. Ennis is a great place
to live, but we‘re hard-working,
highly religious, diverse and Tex-
ans. Often that is a somewhat
lethal combination for persistent
positivity.
Let’s do what we can as a com-
munity to help our local busi-
nesses grow and remain positive
in doing so.
If we can get either one of
those things moving over the next
52 weeks, we’ll all see some signif-
icant progress in the year to
come.
Tre is the publisher of The
Ennis Daily News. He can be
reached at tre@ennisdaily
news.com.
Tre Bischof
From the
publisher
History meets the firearm debate
Barack Obama’s determination
to enact a gun control measure in
the wake of the Connecticut
shootings could transform his
place in history.
Success, which is
anything but assured,
given the lobbies ar-
rayed against him and
the many failures of
such measures, could
upend more than two
centuries of Ameri-
can tradition. It also
could boost the presi-
dent into the pantheon
of liberal presidents,
placing him beside
Franklin D. Roosevelt
and Lyndon B. Johnson as the
principal progressives in modern
American history.
This may seem discordant with
the prevailing view of Obama as a
reluctant warrior, a halting leader,
an eager compromiser whose op-
ponents are more vocal and more
committed than he or his support-
ers. And on the surface, Obama’s
accomplishments may seem to
pale next to those of FDR and LB J,
both of whom passed multiple
pieces of major legislation and
whose programmatic principles
fit neatly under the two-word the-
matic umbrellas of the New Deal
and the Great Society.
Obama lacks such an overarch-
ing template, and his signature
achievements — overhauls of
health care and financial services
to accompany a potential victory
on gun control — would be more
modest in number than those of
Roosevelt (scores of alphabet-soup
initiatives in just a hundred days,
not to mention the Second New
Deal) and Johnson (a war on
poverty housing programs, grand
civil rights victories and sprawl-
ing educational enterprises).
All that is true. But with a vic-
tory on guns Obama would de-
serve an exalted place not because
he could match those who came
before him program for program
or initiative for initiative but be-
cause, unlike them, he would have
achieved major liberal goals that
had eluded his predecessors for
generations.
The first, of course, is a com-
prehensive overhaul of the health
care system, which accounts for
about one-seventh of the economy
arguably affecting more Ameri-
cans more deeply than any meas-
ure promoted by any president
ever.
This is not liberal propaganda,
for if you listen to conservatives
you will hear the identical argu-
ment made with regret: that Oba-
macare and Dodd-Frank are
massive intrusions of govern-
ment interference in
the economy with lit-
tle if any precedent. If
that argument can be
made persuasively by
conservatives, and you
can hear it almost
daily on talk radio,
then it can be made by
liberals to elevate
Obama among pro-
gressive presidents.
A victory on gun
control would simi-
larly set off an earth-
quake across the American
political landscape.
Curtailing the availability of
weapons has been a liberal goal
since the assassinations of Martin
Luther King Jr. and Robert F.
Kennedy in 1968, with a few con-
servatives, including former
White House press secretary
James Brady joining the effort
after the 1981 attempt to assassi-
nate Ronald Reagan.
What Obama almost certainly
will propose will be more far-
reaching than any proposal on
this subject by any previous pres-
ident, and if he prevails he will
have succeeded where other chief
executives with liberal leanings,
including Johnson, Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton, have failed.
Although liberals would be re-
luctant to agree, a victory on gun
control also would be a profound
departure in American progres-
sive history.
The story of American liberal-
ism is the accumulation of rights.
The nation began with brave En-
lightenment-era talk about the
rights of man, but that very
phrase, part of the vocabulary of
the late 18th century and the title
of a Thomas Paine manifesto,
specifically omitted half the pop-
ulation and, because of the pres-
ence of slavery in the new nation
(and the decision to count slaves
as three-fifths of a person), dele-
gated these vaunted rights to a
distinct minority of people who
thought they lived in a land con-
secrated by majority rule.
The glory of American liberal-
ism has been the extension of
rights to those who did not own
property to those who were not
male, to those who were not white,
to those who were not straight.
But a major gun control victory
for Obama — awarded an “F” by
the Brady Center to Prevent Gun
Violence after signing 2009 legis-
lation permitting people to carry
concealed weapons in national
parks — would be the first signifi-
cant abrogation of American
rights in our history.
Prohibition does not count; the
18th amendment did not curtail
what had been a constitutionally
protected right. Limiting gun
rights, as NRA members argue,
would do so.
Obama’s higher status would
reflect his success in redeeming
long-sought liberal measures.
Though he would have only a
few legislative achievements to
his credit — plus nudging same-
sex marriage toward the main-
stream — the decades-long
resistance to his initiatives would
give them special standing.
Most of Roosevelt’s accom-
plishments, which include the
Civilian Conservation Corps, the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, the
Wagner Act, the Works Progress
Administration and others, were
emergency responses to the Great
Depression, not measures longed
for by liberals for decades.
Obama’s health care overhaul is
arguably as profound an element
of the American social contract as
FDR’s Social Security Act of 1935
(and LBJ’s Medicare legislation of
1965). Roosevelt’s legislation cre-
ating the National Recovery Ad-
ministration was struck down by
the Supreme Court, while
Obama’s health care legislation
was upheld.
By the same token, many of
Johnson’s Great Society initia-
tives grew out a sense that a na-
tion as prosperous as mid-1960s
America ought to share its bounty
with the aged, hungry poor and
striving.
Indeed, aside from civil rights,
most of the Great Society projects
were quickly conceived, not long-
thwarted.
Obama has stirred bitter oppo-
sition from conservatives and bit-
ter disappointment from liberals.
Though conservatives believe
he personifies unbounded liberal-
ism, many of his putative allies
believe he hasn’t pushed hard or
far enough.
If a major gun control measure
is signed into law, history will
argue otherwise.
David M. Shribman is executive
editor of the Post-Gazette (dshrib-
man@post-gazette.com, 412 263-
1890). Follow him on Twitter at
ShribmanPG.
David
Shribman
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Todaro, Nick. The Ennis Daily News (Ennis, Tex.), Ed. 1 Sunday, January 6, 2013, newspaper, January 6, 2013; Ennis, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth772167/m1/4/?rotate=90: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Ennis Public Library.