That's how it is. Period.

Saturday, July 22, 2006

May 2006
A PERSONAL LETTER

To: Susan J. Tweit

I read your piece on Christo and Jeanne Claude’s Over the River project in The Denver Post and was disappointed at the casualness with which you, a naturalist, can promote a new encroachment, albeit temporary and in the name of art, on the natural beauty of this portion of the Arkansas River canyon between Canon City and Salida, Colorado.

A Colorado native of 79 years, I worked for the Salida Daily Mail-Record from 1949 to 1952. I’ve driven Highway 50 up and down this canyon many times, and I always marveled at the breathtaking vistas that need no artificial enhancement.

Leave the canyon alone. Humankind has already done terrible things to it—all for “a good purpose.” Let rich people with big egos leave their footprint on the region in some other, less controversial fashion. I doubt that Salida would have had much of a library early on had it not been for Andrew Carnegie, and now a new, spacious art and history museum dedicated to the town by Christo and Jeanne Claude, bearing their names, would surely be welcomed, be of a more lasting intrinsic value, and attract tourists too.

If the Over the River project ever comes to a statewide vote, (and it may end up there, who knows?), I will vote no. Colorado has been entirely fair with this artistic team in its use of public property, having allowed the Valley Curtain project near Rifle. The principals have done their thing here, and need to move on.

You have my permission to forward a copy of this to High Country News, distributor of your columns, whose email address I could not find on its Web site.

Percy Conarroe
Longmont CO
Letter to editor, 7-08-06
Longmont (CO) Times-Call

OVERSTEPPING BOUNDS

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Pity the unfortunate woman who hoped to better her life by purchasing an established equestrian center on 71 acres of agriculturally-zoned land south of Longmont, only to have Boulder County’s Land Use Department come along and shut the whole operation down. (“Ranch corralled,” T-C 7-4-06). One does have to wonder just where an equestrian center should be appropriately sited, if not out on the prairie.

In Boulder County, the County Commissioners not only control all the land within their jurisdiction but have also positioned themselves dictatorially into micromanaging every square inch of ground and everything on it through a separate bureaucracy called the Land Use Department, which has its own headquarters. Facing of all this raw power, there’s not much hope for this woman and her agriculturally friendly enterprise.

She is most likely just another victim of Boulder County’s overreaching zoning laws, and her options are few. She can either go hat-in-hand to the Board of Commissioners and beg penance (although I have never heard of the commissioners breaking stride with their enforcers), or go lawyer-up big-time and really wreck her financial future if she loses. The County Commissioners and Land Use Department have nothing to lose, of course, since the taxpayers pick up their legal tabs.

But wasn’t this a lot of what the Declaration of Independence was all about, the heavy-handedness of those in power?

Percy Conarroe

Letter to editor
Boulder Daily Camera 6-24-06

FLAG BURNING—Vote, leave Old Glory alone

Columnist Nat Hentoff and former Nebraska U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey think it is perfectly all right to burn or desecrate our flag to show disdain for our country ("Our flag and our freedom," op-ed, June 21) and they downplay those of us who seek to overturn the wrongheaded 1989, 5-4 Supreme Court decision that forces acceptance of this violent form of protest. I reject the idea that to democratically pursue steps to protect the flag from abuse is tantamount to being against the Constitution.

The flag cannot speak — it is inert, harmless and incapable of causing disillusionment, treachery, betrayal or disgust. It poses no threat. To the contrary, it is the proud symbol of the most successful form of government on planet Earth, and just as our system of government deserves respect from all of us, so does its symbol. Nobody can be forced to respect the flag, yet those who do not respect it should be restrained by law from maliciously burning or physically attacking it, no matter their station in life. This has nothing to do with satire or calm rejection.

It's time to get back to our country's normalcy, the two centuries preceding 1989, by again denying a privileged few the right to abuse the flag to bring attention to themselves.

People whose uncontrollable anger drives them to act out their childish tantrums by physically attacking the flag are the ones who are sullying our First Amendment rights through their excess. People make policy, flags don't. Go vote, work to change policy, and leave Old Glory alone.

There are limits to free speech. Try libeling someone or making a politically incorrect remark and see how far your First Amendment rights go.

The flag is my flag, too, and if ever I get the chance to vote against this political mischief of flag desecration cloaked as a free-speech issue, I will do so.

PERCY CONARROE

Longmont

About Me

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Retired in 1998 after a 50-year career of editing and publishing Colorado small-town weekly newspapers. He served as president of the Colorado Press Association in 1981 and was awarded an honorary lifetime membership.