Category Archives: Uncategorized

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/ 

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

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

Church and State

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To the editor:

Christianity, and religion in general, has a complex and checkered history in America. Many among the first settlers were religious refugees fleeing persecution by the Church of England and seeking freedom to practice their beliefs, which included the fanatical Puritan Salem Witch Trials. The separation of Church and State was the caveat then applied to freedom of religion when both were enshrined in the Constitution.

The result is that America today is a virtual patchwork, jigsaw puzzle of religious beliefs and places of worship, all living in a relative state of accepted coexistence, albeit not without longstanding tensions between Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and now Islamic believers. There have been noteworthy crossovers between the two sectors. The Church of Latter-day Saints was forced to disavow polygamy to allow statehood for Utah and black Southern Baptist churches have been the target of White Supremacists after the passage of voting rights legislation, but peyote is now recognized as a legal sacrament for the Native American Church and we have had both a Catholic and a Black President, although JFK had to state his Catholic beliefs would not intrude into office, and Barack Obama was caught continually in America’s Black/White divide. Christianity itself, be it Protestant or Catholic, seems deeply divided over a preference for Old Testament or New Testament values, and currently the separation of Church and State is under constant attack.

Betsy DeVos, as Secretary of Education, is pushing for public funding of religious schools, and the opposition to contraception, abortion, and same-sex sexuality as interpreted in the Bible is being pressed into federal and state legislation. Catholics on the Supreme Court appear poised to upturn earlier decisions on these issues. Clearly a line esteemed by the Founding Fathers is being crossed and should be patriotically resisted. 

RP

Futures

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To the Editor:
As we sit around wondering how to fill our socially distanced days, this seems an excellent time to imagine how we might like our post-Corvid-19 life to be. Ingrained ways die hard, but there is hope that a better world can arise from the ashes of yet another failed global economy. A viral pandemic presents a far different dynamic than the 2008 financial collapse caused by the precipitous capital greed and mismanagement of the banking industries. Rather than having just one leg of the three-legged economic stool, capital. labor, and consumer, collapse, two legs have been knocked out. There are many, particularly among those nations and people who prospered most, who hope this collapsed structure of exchange can and will be rebuilt, but perhaps this is instead a golden opportunity to seek other answers to the global concentration of wealth and power in elitist classes and nations. Perhaps the Corvid-19 pandemic is not a signal of the coming End Times, but one of a new beginning for humankind. 

RP

The Master

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To the Editor:…and the COOTER, the combined ClioOscarObieTonyEmmyRazzie award goes to…drum roll…Donald J. Trump! No finer actor of the modern era has so captivated the spotlight and imagination of America and the world like this masterful performer on every stage he appears. The question remains, who is the man creating this remarkable theater? Future historians may pull away the mask, but for now we can only marvel at the performance we witness day after day. He is the consummate master of absurdist theater, a bit fantastical but, as in the layered subtext of film noir, a larger than life persona exhibiting flashes of insight into the sinuous threads of human desire. 16,000 (and counting) lies have been noted and documented, but is it truly lying when every public appearance is a stage performance blending fantasy and reality, a Gordian Knot to be untied? The sad tragedy of this rare gift is the damage being done by stagehands behind the scenes.    

RP

Taking the 5th

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To the Editor:
While there is much discussion over the 2nd Amendment and the rights and limits of gun ownership, we hear less and less about the 5th, which states that a person sworn under oath to tell the truth is allowed to not answer self-incriminating questions. Underlying this right is a profound respect for both a sworn oath and truth saying. Given the seemingly decaying value of truth in public and political life today, one wishes that all those sworn to uphold the Constitution would take the 5th rather than proclaiming outright lies

RP

Metaphor

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To the Editor:
Historically, WWII, “The Last Good War”, was fought to prevent Hitler’s military conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union. Metaphorically, it can be likened to radical chemotherapy aimed at stopping the aggressive spread of Hitler’s White Nationalist elitism. The Nazis were defeated, but the cancer has now metathesized into authoritarian regimes across Europe and into Conservative politics and religion here. That the Americas are regarded as God’s gift to the white race, its Manifest Destiny, is the greatest blasphemy of American Christianity. 

-RP