Town and Gown

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To the Editor:

Boulder has been a college town since first landing the University of Colorado. As the University grew, the city benefited and grew around it as a symbiotic partner. Under Bruce Benson and a Republican Board of Regents, tired of having to go hat-in-hand to an increasingly tight-fisted State Legislature for funding, CU adopted a pro-growth corporate real estate business model–bigger is better and more is more money. The University is run as a business operation, with generous tax benefits. Similarly, the City Council has joined the growth and development bandwagon and, for some unknown reason, so has the local Indian Peaks Chapter of the Sierra Club. How this has fared for Boulder residents is where problems arise. Housing has not kept pace with business development and thousands of cars commute into and drive around town every day, resulting in constantly increasing traffic congestion and ozone pollution. It is impossible to find practical benefit for residents and neighborhoods from the Google invitation, the University’s Limelight (hogging) Hotel on the Hill, or the proposed South Campus expansion on a site that is a natural open wonder as it stands “as is”. CU, the City Council, and the Sierra Club have each chosen to ignore the impact of the project on its carbon footprint and utilities use despite the reality of climate change, global warming, and the West’s continuing drought. In the coming election, the people of Boulder have an opportunity to make a clear statement for the environment and for themselves. Vote Yes to Repeal.

RP

Development

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To the Editor:

While pointedly a Boulder bubble issue, the referendum to repeal an annexation agreement between CU and the City which allows the University to build another campus on a former riparian wetland/floodplain on the south end of town has ramifications beyond residents’ concerns about potential flooding and local traffic congestion and pollution. There are bigger issues at stake. Global warming, the extended drought across the West, and increasingly strong weather events are the direct result of our pumping long dormant fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Climate change is global, and the Earth is becoming far less accommodating of our life on it. Conserving water and reducing, not increasing, our natural gas use and overall carbon footprint are regularly ignored. The University of Colorado is a public institution and its governing Board of Regents is elected statewide. As a major rental developer in Boulder, it should be acting more for the overall public good rather than its narrow self interest. Such environmental consideration should be applied to development projects all along the Front Range.

RP

CU South/Just Undo It

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To the Editor:

An echinacea tea bag tag has a Vincent Van Gogh quote, “If one truly loves nature, one finds beauty everywhere.” As the area stands today, there are a thousand paintings, poems, and photographs waiting in the former wet land/gravel pit flood plain that the University wishes to develop as its “South Campus”. It is my wish everyone in Boulder, looking with Vincent’s eye, visits this site to see what will be destroyed should this project go forward. It will never be the same again. Intrinsic to its natural wonder is its open accessibility and availability of multiple footpaths to navigate the area. Again, all this will disappear if the University and the City Council have their way. Construction traffic of out-of-town workers will further clog rush hour traffic, and needed parking will consume acres of the site, And public access will disappear completely during the City’s flood mitigation efforts (which have yet to meet federal standards). Mitigating flooding of houses built on a historic flood plain may well prove to be a fool’s endeavor. My crawlspace in Martin Acres flooded not from Skunk Creek overflowing its banks, but from soil saturation and ground water rise. Rather than seeing the natural world as a source of beauty, the vision of the University and of the City seem clouded with consumer dollar signs. We must stop eating the Earth. CU South/ Just Undo It. 

RP

Avatar

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Religious and exploitive, white supremacy has been at the core of the American ethos since the first European colonists arrived. The New World was God’s gift to enterprising freedom seekers, and what a grand gift it has been. Waves of entrepreneurs, religious and economic, swept across the continent, pushing aside all standing in their way. Donald Trump, thus, is not an upstart anomaly in the American experience. He is the embodiment of a segment of its ethnic and cultural psyche and history. That he has millions of America First, true believers enthusiastically supporting his candidacy shows how deeply embedded bullying white supremacy remains in the hearts of much of the American public. He is their avatar, and it is he and his followers who are the true victims of injustice in today’s morally and technologically evolving world. “We represent all that is great in America and we are under attack spiritually, emotionally, and economically. We are its anchor”. If there is weakness in Trump’s drive to power it is his blatant need of acceptance and love, and that white supremacy no longer abides below the radar and now needs a heroic figurehead. A nationwide admittance of Truth and Reconciliation concerning the dark side of American history is possible but perhaps a bridge too far. Further, there is in Moby Dick, that most American of novels, the example of the sailors on the Pequod, open-eyed, casting their lot with the mad obsession of Ahab. America’s future awaits.

RP

On and on

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Cultural momentum, be Chinese and Russian authoritarian imperialism or Euro-American colonial white supremacy, remain primal driving forces in world political history. The same must be said of the religious institutions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, each claiming being the favorite of God, and equally so of the global consumption of the life and riches of the Earth for survival and power. War and violence, profit and larceny, have been part and parcel of human history from its onset. As for American democracy being “a shining city on a hill”, armaments and munitions sales are soaring, fossil fuel drilling and consumption are booming, Andrew Jackson, father of the Trail of Tears, remains the face of the $20 bill, and Donald Trump aspires to an autocratic Presidency and has an avid following. The trajectory of mankind, increasingly technologically accelerated, seems ever more virally spiraling out of control, trending toward an uncertain end. The meek may well be destined to inherit the Earth or at least what is left of it. A basic law of physics states that a body in motion remains in motion until meeting a countering force. The heart of humankind is divided, at best bipolar, in imagining the future. Where we eventually land is narrowing precipitously.

RP

Disorder

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Regarded honestly, our American (and now global) psycho-social political economic configuration and underpinnings have no capacity nor inclination to realistically address global warming, the concentration of wealth, economic and climate migration, drug addiction, homelessness, misogyny, gun violence, unending (and profitable) warfare, nor universal healthcare, yet capitalist enterprise continues to be held up as the human ideal and inevitable “way of the world”. The world of finance thrives in an ethos built on the use of all available resources, human and natural. This ecology, our relationship with the world around us, is uniquely adversarial, exploitive, and destructive. “The Market” is worshipped as an all-powerful god. Those benefiting from this state of affairs, corporate and individual, have no qualms about using all their privilege, power, and wealth to maintain the status quo. Maximum profit is the “Golden Rule” of modern corporate business. Throughout history, those drawn to the allure and trappings of power and wealth have dominated the distribution of community well-being. “Overlord” is an antique term, but it is the most accurate description of today’s sociopolitical economy. Whether this is human nature or a carefully crafted manipulation to enrich a small elite class is the question of the Ages.

-RP

With God on our side

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Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all came into being in the Middle East, and there was a time adherents lived there in relative peace. It is beyond tragic that the region has become the flash point of intense economic and religious conflict. Righteousness and favor in God’s eye (in all three religions) ideally would seem to lead to charity and peace, but concepts of superiority and the allure of dominance have muscled their way into the minds of religious and political leaders. At the root of the problem is that all three religions trace their origin to the God of Abraham, by all accounts a stern, watchful, autocratic, at times vengeful entity seemingly without joy and laughter. From this beginning, the Middle East today is inevitably destined to erupt in a violent confrontation of differing interpretations of what gains the favor of a God who decreed, “thou shall have no other god above me”. Monotheism here has thus evolved into a contentious, deadly state of affairs, and while we may well indeed have a God problem (the claim of being made in his image speaks not particularly well of that God), what we actually have is a humanity problem, from which we have created a God from our own tendencies, one prone to violence, misogyny, male supremacy, a thirst for power, and penchant for war. At this core is the belief that power comes from an ability to dominate and destroy rather than one based on creativity and nurture. By definition, politics deals with the distribution of power within a society, economics on the distribution of wealth, and religion on leading a life that gains the favor of a supreme power. In today’s world, the combination of these three has become a Gordian’s Knot that intrinsically defies solution. The beliefs that Jews are God’s Chosen People, that martyrdom for Islam will be rewarded in the afterlife by Allah, and that possessing economic and military power, wealth and dominion, is God’s design for mankind are all addled misconceptions. Throughout history, civilizations and gods have come and gone. Until we truthfully acknowledge and resolve our darkest human tendencies, the future of all life on Earth remains in great peril.

RP

Disappointment

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It is disappointing that the editorial boards of both the Daily Camera and the Boulder Weekly have ignored the reality of global warming and climate change and chosen to believe in the competence of the City’s flood plan and that there are benevolent intentions in the University’s South Boulder expansion. It has long been an American ethic that the Earth exists for man to use and abuse for profit. The proposed “South Campus” site thus is seen as a wasteland awaiting development which will result in a net gain for the people of Boulder, despite the resulting increase of neighborhood traffic, during and after construction, and the loss of free access to a truly unique and irreplaceable piece of the natural world.

The truth that the proposed flood plan, paid for by all of Boulder, protects only a fraction of the homes impacted by the 2013 flood and that the real beneficiary is the University’s corporate business model, a massive rental empire allowed to operate largely tax-free, goes unnoted.

The net loss is heartbreaking for anyone truly caring for both the environment and the soul of mankind.

Vote Yes on 2F. For photos from the area, please visit notesfromtheprovinces.com/photography/ 

Self Help Manual

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To the Editor:
Solving the problems of homelessness, the concentration of wealth, racial injustice, healthcare, and climate change will require a seismic, systemic cultural shift that few view as a feasible option, but until that change is undertaken America (and the rest of the world) will continue to wallow in stubborn short-sightedness. Self sufficiency and enterprise are fine values, but when independence and freedom fail to recognize that the success of humankind in the long run rests on cooperative effort and cohesion, we land in a power hungry world of individual and environmental exploitation, increasingly divided and at odds with itself. Such is the slippery slope of capitalist theory. What is needed is an economic theory based not on banking values, but rather on humanitarian ideals.

RP

Foretold

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The jealous anger of Zeus
Had no bounds yet
There was wisdom too shown
When Prometheus was bound
To endless disembowelment
For revealing the power
Of fire to humankind,
Perhaps prophesy as well,
The outcome foreknown.

As the gods, in their day
Rose against the Titans,
In turn mankind rose
Against the gods.
With the gods and godless
Fallen into war and ruin
The earthbound Titans
Again hold sway.