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Some recent correspondence has come from Golden, urging me to take up arms against progress in the form of a metropolitan beltway that would rip the community apart while adding the blessings of increased noise and air pollution.
But we have to look at the benefits. My parents live in Longmont, and visiting them currently means taking U.S. 285 to C-470 to I-70 to I-76 to I-25 to Colo. 119. This involves going about six miles farther east than absolutely necessary, then backtracking those six miles, so a beltway might save me upwards of 30 minutes per round trip, and with enough trips, it might compensate for the extra driving involved with the siting of Denver International Airport in western Kansas.
Some Golden officials have responded in a way very uncharacteristic of Colorado public officials. Instead of cooperating in every way possible with the Asphalt & Gravel Lobby, they have actually tried to serve the constituents who elected them, and proposed that if this road must be built, then it should be stuffed into a tunnel so as to disturb Golden residents as little as possible.
This deviance from Colorado standards has not sat well with neighboring suburbs, which argue that the tunnel would be hideously expensive, and that Golden is just trying to block the highway which would save metro drivers a lot of time for at least a fortnight, when it, too, would be overcrowded and congested, allowing some future candidate for governor to promise even more transportation improvements.
At any rate, some of my Golden correspondence concludes
with All we want is to be left alone.
Since about 1876, Colorado has done a pretty good job of leaving Golden alone. It was the territorial capital until Denver wrested that away after 1867. In the railroad battles of the early 1870s, the Denver Crowd (led by John Evans, Jerome Chaffee and John Chivington, aligned with the Denver Pacific) stomped the Golden Crowd (William A. H. Loveland and Henry M. Teller, aligned with the Colorado Central).
Golden accepted these defeats and settled into life as a provincial county seat while Denver went on to become the dominant city of the Mountain West.
Thus the refrain of All we want is to be left
alone,
which I also encountered in correspondence from
an Arapahoe County resident who does not care to live in
the proposed new city of Centennial or the imperialistic
enclave of Greenwood Village.
I've also heard this from people in the Parkdale area (a
few miles west of Cañon City) who upset about a
quarry, from Salida residents concerned that a proposed
master plan would force gentrification upon them, from
ranchers worried about water development in the upper
Gunnison, from those who might be neighbors of an
industrial swine production facility, from rural property
owners who somehow felt threatened by a hiking trail --
just about anywhere you turn, you can hear All we want
is to be left alone.
I hate to be the one to break this news, since I often share that desire to be left alone, but our great republic operates on precisely the opposite principle.
Do you think that the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Lakota and Ute nations ever asked anything more of American than to be left alone? And did it ever happen?
Of course not. They were in the way of Manifest Destiny, and even if there were promises in the form of solemn treaties about leaving them alone, they were swept aside.
Did the Mormons begin emigrating to Utah in 1846 for any reason other than to be left alone? And were they left alone to practice the polygamous marriages then sanctioned by their church? No.
Perhaps the leave us alone
attitude got a bad
reputation in 1860 when southern states began seceding from
the Union.
They feared that Abraham Lincoln would not keep his promises not to interfere with slavery inside the states. Southern leaders believed that only by forming their own country could they preserve what they already had, and throughout the Civil War, they kept insisting that all they wanted was to be left alone.
This dialogue may have poisoned future discourse -- the
noble sentiment of please leave us alone
became
intertwined with the ignoble defense of chattel slavery.
The agrarian South was stagnant and wanted to stay that
way; the industrial North was progressive and could no more
leave the South alone than it could ignore minerals in the
West.
And so it has been ever since. Even if your community
tries to operate in a just and humane way, the surest way
to have it destroyed by an invasion is to announce that
All we want is to be left alone.
The American Way does not allow for leaving people alone.
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