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Many years ago, a fellow writer at the campus paper
suggested a Cause of the Month Club.
You'd receive a
regular packet containing reasons for your outrage, a list
of firms to boycott, directions to the regional
demonstration, particulars about bail bondsmen and a fresh
filter cartridge for your gas mask.
Perhaps this proposal never succeeded because T.V. Hagenaugh, its creator, went on to be a flak for the Peace Corps, and regular employment at a living wage often tends to dull one's creativity. Besides, even in this great and diverse Republic, the day has come when good causes are in short supply.
Thus we see herculean labors devoted to bad, stupid, misguided or incomprehensible causes, among them historic preservation in Denver.
Bob Ewegen has already pointed out the imbecility of preserving the old May D&F building, and if there's any charm worth embalming in the facade of the Denver Public Library, my esthetic sense has missed it.
Suffice it to say that Denver's preservationists have generally been people who would somehow let Union Station fall, but would manage to preserve Terminal Annex as a significant manifestation of the Banal Institutional Blond-brick School of White-bread Design.
Down in the San Juans, a Boulder schoolmarm has nested
in a tree as a protest aimed at preserving an old growth
forest.
Devoted as I am to civic duty, I read many environmental
publications; I even write for them sometimes. Despite all
my reading, though, I've yet to find any definition of
old growth forest.
When we don't know the difference between worthy
old-growth forests and undeserving plain old forests, why
should we devote our energies to preserving one, probably
at the expense of the other? Perhaps it's a good cause, but
not until old-growth forest
turns into something
more than a mantra to be chanted by the faithful.
You can't even say that much for a recent demonstration in New York, aimed at a judge who allowed a divorced father to have supervised visits with his four-year-old daughter. The mother had alleged sexual abuse, though there was no evidence. Then the mother killed herself and the little girl.
The demonstrators, among them Gloria Steinem and actress Lee Grant, apparently support two rather dubious propositions: 1) Some people are guilty until proven innocent, and 2) You can become a martyr if you murder your own child.
Of late, the murdering of children has generally been the work of federal agents in Texas and Idaho, but some might find comfort in seeing that Americans are going back to doing things for themselves, rather than sitting back and waiting for the government.
At any rate, the New York demonstration, old-growth protests and May D&F are just more evidence of the cause shortage, so severe that it almost inspires nostalgia for Vietnam, the draft and Richard Nixon.
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