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Many of my friends in Salida look upon a trip to Denver as something worse than a root canal, an IRS audit or an announcement that their in-laws are coming for a two-week visit. They worry about the traffic and the noise, the air quality, the panhandlers, the parking hassles, the metropolitan crime rate -- there are reasons, after all, that some of us are country mice and other folks are city mice.
So if they could vote in the city, they'd probably
support an initiative on the current Denver ballot, the
Initiative for Safety through Peace.
It's the product of one Jeff Peckman, along with various activists and members of the Natural Law Party. They needed 2,458 signatures to get it on the ballot last summer, and they just made it, with 2,462 signatures.
Even though the Denver City Council didn't really want to put it on the ballot -- perhaps out of fear that the city would become a national laughingstock -- the city's election law left no choice.
So Denver voters will get to decide whether the city
government should ensure public safety by increasing
peacefulness -- that is, by defusing political, religious
and ethnic tension both locally and globally -- through the
identification and implementation of any systematic,
stress-reducing techniques or programs.
If this should pass, it shouldn't hurt the city's
important branding-and-marketing project. After all, we're
always reading about the People's Republic of Boulder,
where pets are officially companion animals
and
owners are guardians
-- and Boulder is well-known
nationally without any expensive marketing program.
The same holds for other cities. Aspen is at least four
kinds of strange, and everybody knows about it. San
Francisco is seriously weird, and Los Angeles enjoys forms
of dementia we haven't even imagined. They may not qualify
as serious cities,
but they're all well-known, and
popular tourist destinations as well. So an eccentric
reputation shouldn't hurt Denver -- indeed, it could help
-- in its efforts to attract tourists, residents and
business.
However, I have to question the need for the stress-reduction initiative. If you make certain personal adjustments, then a visit to Denver need not be all that stressful, even when you're coming from the backwaters of Colorado.
Traffic? It is stressful indeed when I'm driving my old Blazer, with its standard transmission and minimal configuration. But we've also got a little car with air-conditioning, an automatic transmission and a good stereo. Thus it's easy to relax; after all, you're not going anywhere because you're in gridlock.
Plus, it's tiny and sits so low that we can't see over or around all the spewts. The less we can see, the less we have to worry about. If we get crushed by some huge vehicle, we'll never see it coming.
Noise? Sirens are so rare here that we usually run
outdoors to see what's going on when we hear one. So
Denver's abundance of sirens generated stress until I
remembered the adage, When in Rome, do as the
Romans.
Denver drivers pay no attention to sirens, so
why should I?
Parking? This used to make me nervous, because I was never sure where we could or couldn't park, especially when our younger daughter Abby attended the University of Denver. The parking stress got even more intense when she moved to Capitol Hill.
But there are ways to adjust. Now I just figure I'm going to get a parking ticket on every trip to the city. That assumption reduces the stress. And if I don't get one? Then there's a pleasant surprise.
Police? There was a time when I worried about Denver's trigger-happy police department, fearing that I might match some profile, or back up at the wrong time in the wrong parking lot, or be visiting a friend when the drug squad got the wrong address -- stuff like that.
However, District Attorney Bill Ritter assures us that the police acted properly in every killing. After I learned that, I felt much better.
To be sure, Denver's municipal government could work to reduce stress. But reducing stress is not what governments do. The more stressful things there are, the more government we think we need. More government means more confusing laws, tickets and sirens. It can never mean less stress.
Peckman and his colleagues may mean well, but their goals can never be shared by the city. Besides, you don't need to take up Transcendental Meditation to reduce your personal stress levels. You just have to learn to see the parking ticket as a personalized souvenir from your peaceful journey to the enlightened city.
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