Declaration of Dependence

(Denver Post, May 2) “Son, you have become a man. Mom and I are so proud of your maturity. In turning 21 today and taking a bride tomorrow, you reach the age of emancipation. This is literally your time of being set free, entering upon self-determined adulthood. What a milestone. Because we care for you and your wife and children, we’ll stay involved as parents in a few small ways. We will provide a house for you, and cars as needed. We will supply you energy for all those. Of course we’ll always cover the medical bills for you and the kids. Costs of school and college will be on us as well. Plus an income floor. Pay a share of these things if you can, but don’t strain yourself. It’s our tribute to your independence.” Independence, Dad? Who are you kidding? That’s a gilded cage. Any mother and father who coddled their grown children this way (some do, of course, to their sorrow) would be committing parental malpractice. Any son or daughter thus “cared for” should feel insulted, indentured, and infantilized.

But consider: The dependence we find so repugnant if indulged within the family is all around us politically, under paternalistic big government. Housing, heating, healing, food, fuel, lighting, leisure, teaching, transportation, and pocket money are ALL now provided, subsidized, or facilitated for many of us by the omnipotent State. And the trend line keeps rising, no matter which party is charge. We’re hooked.

To feed our habit, Americans will pay more in taxes this year than everything we spend for food, clothing, and shelter. And to meet the remaining cost of paternalism, we’ll borrow yet more from our grandkids. This year’s actual Tax Freedom Day, deficit included, isn’t until May 17. Obama’s spending orgy in 2009 and 2010 has pushed it later than at any time since World War II. Then we were fighting for survival. Now we’re just gorging for appetite.

Don’t worry, though. Those health care heroes, the Democrats, have the cure for our fiscal obesity: more calories. In honor of April 15, state Sen. Chris Romer warned that Colorado can’t hope to have a thriving economy “until we learn to raise our taxes.” That same week, US Sen. Michael Bennet claimed the Tea Party movement is “trafficking in a kind of nihilistic vision that says we don't have a responsibility to the next generation.” So now dependency is a duty?

Most Coloradans, whether their party is R or D or Tea, would snort in disgust if you gave them a Declaration of Dependence to sign. Statehood was only granted us, after all, on condition of upholding the Declaration of Independence. We pay it lipservice, picturing ourselves as “a free people” who honorably direct their own “lives and fortunes,” and resist despotism “with manly firmness.” Yet sadly, we’re more like a fatty seeing muscle in the mirror. The firm self-reliance of our forefathers has gone to flab.

The collectivist freebies we all depend on are scarcely imagined in the Colorado Constitution – and unauthorized in the United States Constitution. Immense unfunded liabilities for entitlements and pensions, state and federal alike, loom like Katrina headed for landfall. Yet the political establishment shrugs off the impending emergency. Democrats and Republicans, courts and media, labor and business have combined to weaken this state’s best protection, TABOR.

Citizens unwilling to declare their dependence have put on the ballot a TABOR rescue package. Amendment 60 restores our vote on property taxes. Amendment 61 restores our vote on debt. Proposition 101 cuts the tax on cars, phones, and income. Womb-to-tomb paternalism will suffocate our liberty and prosperity if we don’t bestir ourselves. Passing those three measures would be a start.

Freedom at the tipping point

(Denver Post, Apr. 18) “The British are coming,” Paul Revere’s alarm to the Massachusetts countryside on this day in 1775, conveys an urgency you don’t get from the equivalent warning of 2010, “The bankruptcy is coming.” Fact is, though, fiscal implosion threatens the aging United States of today as grimly as the redcoats threatened the newborn nation of 235 years ago. The question is whether Americans will come awake as the patriots did on that historic night, or sleepwalk into the abyss. I fear for our country, optimist that I am, because the answer is not clear. To stop blindly expanding entitlements we can’t fund and borrowing what we can’t repay, the country has to snap out of politics as usual. We need a brutally honest self-appraisal, AA-style. The Tea Party movement is doing that, but so far the old-line Democratic and Republican parties are not. America’s genius for self-correction has never been more needed.

We must save ourselves from a terminal case of debtor’s disease state by state, with Washington dragged in last. It will be Massachusetts setting a good example with Scott Brown after setting a bad one on subsidized health care. Illinois passing pension reform while California remains in denial. New Jersey’s Chris Christie stepping up as a budget-balancing governor as our own Bill Ritter whiffs.

In Colorado neither the legislative session nor the election campaign has yet risen above politics as usual. Democrats raised taxes rather than discipline spending. Republicans went for higher electric rates on dubious environmental grounds. Both settled for a bandaid on the PERA pension cancer. The House Speaker favors an ACORN election bill. Bipartisan senators plan another strike at petition rights.

Constitutional amendments initiated by the people, you see, are part of what ails Colorado in the view of some elected politicians. They want to make it twice as hard for you and me to revise our own charter of government. Such restraints on power as term limits in 1990 and tax limits in 1992 couldn’t be so readily imposed in the better future these visionaries offer us. No thanks.

In the US Senate race, meanwhile, Democratic momentum is with Andrew Romanoff, a friend of the big unions that worsen our fiscal and economic woes, and the Republican field is led by Jane Norton, who supported the easy-spending Referendum C back in 2005, sugar for Colorado’s budgetary diabetes. The Democrats’ likely nominee for governor, Mayor Hickenlooper, is an habitual taxer, yet his opponent Scott McInnis won’t sign a no-tax pledge. Come on, friends, pick it up a notch.

My colleague Richard Bishirjian of Yorktown University contends that part of the problem in Colorado is a “brain drain” due to term limits. The deficit I see isn’t brains but backbone – a spine decline. We’re in danger of being systemically corrupted as a whole people, as the Independence Institute’s Dennis Polhill put it.

Today’s imperative – sober up and man up, or the Chinese will own us – is less galvanizing than a midnight cry to wake up or King George will tyrannize us. But make no mistake, freedom is again at a tipping point. The ascent from bondage to faith to courage to liberty to abundance, traced by historian Alexander Tytler in the 1770s, tilts quickly from abundance to complacency to apathy to dependency, returning then to bondage. Ask yourself where we are on that scale.

The balance our Founders sought, wrote James Madison, was to “first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Two centuries on, badly under Bush and still worse under Obama, Americans are getting little of the one and way too much of the other. We have to turn this around. Will 2010 be the year?

How Easter ended

(Townhall.com, Apr. 2) Dear Grandson: I risk writing you this letter in order to pass along some censored history. Today’s America of 2050, officially atheist by law, is a very different place from the “nation under God” of my boyhood in 2010. When you take your first communion in Denver’s underground church on a spring morning once known as Easter, you need to know how this and other holy days disappeared from the American calendar. Our country at mid-century remains the envy of the world, still fairly prosperous and optimistic, still claiming to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. But I’m sad to tell you that during my lifetime, “brave” and “free” have been redefined so as to disallow any reverence for that power whom our founders called the Creator. Christians and Jews have been made outlaws. So hide my letter with your Bible; both are illegal to possess. It is only because your father and mother honor the civil-disobedience tradition of Martin Luther King and ignore the ban on Judeo-Christian writings that you can read the Scriptures at all.

How tragically does the noisy complacency of my parents back in the Bush and Obama years contrast with the quiet courage of your parents today. Again we see how adversity brings out the best in the people of God, as all history teaches. If believers had been more vigilant for freedom of conscience back in the Teens, judges wouldn’t have dared to rewrite the First Amendment as they did in the Tiernan case.

Instead, young Timothy, your generation grows up in a spiritually-neutered culture that has swiftly taken over what was once the most devout nation on earth. Hence this year of 2050 is punctuated by Bunny Day and Kosher Day on what used to be called Easter and Passover – by Turkey Day and Santa Day in place of Thanksgiving and Christmas. To silence all theistic echoes, even the secular holidays of Memorial Day and Independence Day have been renamed as Peace Day and Sparkler Day.

The dominoes began falling with the election of a “Freedom from Religion” activist, Robert Tiernan, to the Colorado House in 2010. Once in office, he played on the Catholic sex scandals, allegations of evangelical homophobia, and the anti-Israel mood to portray the God of the Bible as civilization’s worst enemy. His bill branding the Gospels and the Torah as hate speech became law on Good Friday, 2012.

A Colorado coalition led by broadcaster James Dobson, Archbishop Charles Chaput, and Rabbi Hillel Goldberg filed suit, denouncing the act as “tyranny worthy of Lenin or Nero.” But the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it. The majority opinion by Justice Keith Ellison, the Muslim former congressman newly appointed by President Obama, ruled that “religion” in the First Amendment excludes by definition every thought, word, and action that manifests intolerance toward any species whatsoever, or the planet itself.

Legislation and court rulings piled on rapidly after that, first marginalizing, then stigmatizing, and finally criminalizing the followers of Jesus and Moses. Islam was judicially certified as a “political system,” however, giving it indulgence and then preference – resulting in the Sharia-infected USA of today. Buddhism and earth-worship also remained free, the one as a “philosophy,” the other as “science.”

The times are grim, my boy. Yet the faithful have survived worse. This Easter, albeit in secrecy and danger, you kneel to a God who loved you enough to come here and die so you might live. Your friend Aaron whispers at Passover his gratitude for a divine deliverance from bondage and death. Down the centuries, neither Caesar nor Satan nor all our own sins have been able to halt these ancient devotions. Nor shall they now. Stay strong – Grandfather

Long road to November

(Denver Post, Mar. 21) Political inexperience was the gold standard among 30 of my neighbors at a precinct caucus in Centennial last week. Fellow Republicans viewed the 2010 contenders for senator and governor with the hard eyes of swindle victims or jilted lovers. The less involved a candidate had been with our party’s time in state and national office over the past dozen years, the more acceptable he or she seemed for nomination this year. Caucus night in March was only the first step on a long road to election night in November, 225 days from now. But it dramatized the “once burned, twice shy” distrust of government that will shape the choices made by Colorado voters in GOP, Democratic, and independent ranks. Trust when broken is hard to restore. That’s the penalty box our whole political system is in right now. Unpredictable new forces are in play as this campaign unfolds. The Tuesday meeting at a school library near our house was older, white, and mostly men. Rainbow America we were not, but we gathered with a love for this land of liberty and a desire to make a difference. Before things started, there was laughter and applause when someone pointed to a presidential book display featuring Barack Obama and George Washington and quipped, “The goal is a government with less of him and more of HIM.”

In the precinct straw poll for a nominee to regain the US Senate seat from Democrats Michael Bennet or Andrew Romanoff, Sedalia businessman and former state Sen. Tom Wiens took 40%, followed by former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton with 37% and district attorney Ken Buck with 23%. In the trial heat for governor, Evergreen businessman and rookie candidate Dan Maes got a notable 44%, trailing former congressman Scott McInnis, the prohibitive favorite, who had 56%.

Our tiny sample largely tracked the statewide Republican tallies, though it was Ken Buck who ran close with Jane Norton in the overall count. More striking to me than the percentages was the mood in the room. A burly guy named Larry spoke for many with his warnings of the tax-and-spend taint attaching to an ex-congressman and an ex- lieutenant governor. Countering him with the case for McInnis and Norton was the more youthful and smooth-spoken Cole, but you could see many skeptical frowns.

I’m uncommitted in both races, and cast a secret ballot that night. Any of the GOP contenders, whatever their shortcomings or the party’s past lapses, would obviously work harder for limited government – the imperative right now, before our country goes bankrupt – than would a Sen. Bennet, a Sen. Romanoff, or a Gov. John Hickenlooper as liberal Democrats. That’s why my party must not self-immolate in the 2010 primary as we did in the 2006 gubernatorial bloodbath. The prize is November.

Dems actually face a tougher task with this year’s fed-up electorate than my side does. Their Colorado ticket will be a pair of entitlement-peddling, union-bought insiders by whatever names. Our nominees can definitely take outside position against that. Whether Republicans are ready to use power more responsibly this time, if trusted with it again, is another question. Bluntly acknowledging that question would be a good start; frontrunners take note.

Nothing can be taken for granted. Lent is a far piece from Halloween. What if an autumn house of horrors found America at war with Iran? The incumbent party might benefit decisively from a rally to the flag. Half a year is an eternity in politics, we’ve learned again and again.

“I’m giving the Republicans one more chance,” Doug told our caucus. Bitterly disillusioned by McCain after 2008, he’s back as a delegate this spring. As buyers’ remorse with Obama deepens, will voters similarly gamble and grant the GOP a do-over?

He painted the true Colorado

[photopress:allen_true_fm_rotunda.jpg,thumb,pp_image] (Denver Post, Mar. 7) “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” mutters a world-weary American to his paramour at the end of a Hemingway novel. The acid dismissal of love typifies suspicion of idealism in any form, a timeless temptation for humankind. Hemingway gave his story a modern setting but borrowed its title, “The Sun Also Rises,” from Ecclesiastes, a world-weary classic of 2200 years ago. Since the novel’s publication in 1926, Americans have gone on to conquer the Depression, defeat Hitler and Tojo, end segregation and polio, win the Cold War, computerize earth and explore space. Still the stance of cynicism toward nobility and goodness is widely fashionable.

To enter the new wing of the Denver Art Museum, for example, you walk past a huge whiskbroom-and-dustpan sculpture and make your way into a jarring, angular Daniel Liebeskind structure that resembles a glass skyscraper felled by an 8.8 earthquake. Don’t assume you know what beauty is, the objects seem to say. Not so fast with your delight in the human spirit and your pride in our civilization.

After running this gauntlet of the unpretty on a recent afternoon, however, I was more than rewarded by the DAM’s enthralling exhibit of the works of Colorado painter and muralist Allen True, 1881-1955. His heroic depiction of man and nature in the older and newer West may not tell the whole story, but it immortalizes a proud part of it that we should gratefully cherish. You need to see our state’s past through True’s eyes.

Trappers, prospectors, pioneers, cowboys and Indians, builders and aviators come to life under his imagination and brush in a way that celebrates their “men to match my mountains” vision and purpose while escaping Hollywood cliché. And equally striking as the art itself is the self-confidence of an era that could give it a public place of honor all across the city and region, not so very long ago.

“More people, more scars upon the land,” the gate-closing grumble of John Denver in “Rocky Mountain High” (named an official state song in 2007), was not the way Allen True’s generation viewed the human settlement and beautification of this vast territory previously written off as the Great American Desert. A good example is the specimen of his art most familiar to Coloradans, the water saga with True’s murals and Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s verse in our State Capitol rotunda. The theme is people flourishing as modernity advances – rather than the depopulation grimly sought by leftist scolds.

Under the painted, silent gaze of True heroes and heroines, lawmakers not only in our capitol but also in those of Wyoming and Missouri (from which Lewis and Clark, Pike and Fremont started west) make decisions for this new century. You’d like to think the vitality, generosity, and optimism of his art – and of Ferril’s poetry, sure that “beyond the sundown is tomorrow’s wisdom” – would guide them more than the cramped and gloomy green ideology now ascendant.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” said Shelley. The way we visualize and verbalize our sense of possibilities has more power to limit or liberate us than any government. Sentimentality is no substitute for reason and reality, of course, as Hemingway’s scorn for “pretty” thought reminds us. But there is a realism in the American success story, captured by the painter True and the poet Ferril, superior to the sentimentalism of frightened Gaia-worship. Let’s embrace it.

The West portrayed in old songs, an open range and Front Range with never a discouraging word, mountain majesties near gleaming cities undimmed by tears, may lack practicality. Yet it’s a better ideal to strive for than anything in Al Gore’s lugubrious poetry – and Allen True depicts it gloriously. The True exhibit runs through March 28, not to be missed.