Our letters section and your opportunity
to weigh in and be heard. Send us your thoughts and profundities. You can contact us here.
(Editor’s note: This letter addresses an article in our Aug. 29 issue.
The letter is late in printing because of two weeks of email trauma.)
Dear Editor, A greater load of horse puckey I have not heard (unless it was Bush claiming to be a “compassionate conservative”) than the Lace/Ace drivel about something called “traditional Colorado values.” You know what? There ain’t any.
My family on both sides goes back to the late 1800s in Colorado, and my grandparents moved to Durango in 1949. We’ve always been staunch Democrats, and I myself am a Green Party member and a proud member of the ACLU. Instead of claiming some farcical finger on the pulse of the real Colorado, what LACE/ACE should be saying is that they represent “traditional conservative values.” No one has a lock claim on representing Colorado “values,” liberal or conservative.
Further, progressive “outsiders” moving to Durango from California and other parts only echo the despair and anger of many, many locals who have grown up with clean air, open space and few people. What is boggling to me is that anyone who claims to care about Colorado, as the Rushes do, would be actively fighting someone like Mark Pearson, who is doing his utmost to help preserve what’s left of what we grew up with.
Perhaps the Rushes and their friends have been brainwashed into thinking what’s good for Huber is good for Durango, but the fact is that the people destroying our county’s agribusiness, wildlands and truly traditional activities are not the progressives and liberals. The newcomer developers and rich free-market capitalists are the obvious culprits! I mean, how many new-age vegans do you see wanting to raze historic buildings or build huge and unsustainable gated subdivisions? How many liberal organic gardeners want to dump a ton of salt in to the Florida daily or drill 12,000 new gas wells? How many progressive activists are destroying people’s ancestral homes with a disgusting, noisy derrick or two?
Somehow LACE/ACE has got their guns trained at the wrong group of newcomers. Maybe they’ve been watching too much FOX News. Regardless, I wish they’d wise up or at the very least, stop confusing “traditional values” with their own, quite recently concocted conservative agenda.
