Now is the strangest time to contemplate public service and write on it as I have done monthly since starting in this role November 1, 2016, coinciding with the election. That concurrence was a boon for framing blogs.
A golden thread weaves through my writings; fear of erratic, irrational, illegal and unethical behavior spreading like a virus, weakening our shared institutions at all levels. My hope is that small governments laboratories serving people across Western Colorado can repair confidence citizens have lost in the entire concept of “public,” of the “we” in “we the people,” and will inform higher expectations for leadership at the federal level. That feels woefully insufficient to our current situation.
This weekend, two legislators in Minnesota were targeted for being public officials; one assassinated, the other wounded and seventy other potential targets were identified. One third of public officials say they personally have been threatened, abused or harassed. Our Secretary of State in Colorado has been targeted or threatened with her life over 1,800 times since 2023. The President calls media “enemies of the state” and those who disagree “the enemy within” inciting domestic terrorism. We need to quit defining this and mass killings without that context. If you disagree, don’t take my word for it, read this from the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point.
Local public servants are rarely recognized for their good work. It is sensible to assume NOTHING is going right in government by absorbing news or social media or the President (besides what he personally is driving). Because streets are built, repaired, swept & plowed, trucks deliver affordable goods, fire trucks rush past my house when there is a wildland fire, and petty theft is rare where we live, so much that we count upon we take for granted. That includes access to affordable groceries, cheap goods from overseas, water that is clean to drink and recreating freely on BLM and Forest Service lands (until it is sold and gated off to corporations or wealthy owners), and we don’t have to worry about people around us disappearing because the government doesn’t like the color of their skin, or protesters exercising First Amendment rights – all that just is, or was as if we deserved it. All that is suddenly at risk.
The President in 2016-2020 tried everything he could think of to challenge every norm that first term. We rolled through a pandemic, racial unrest following George Floyd, an attempt to overturn an election on January 6th and all through it, a housing crisis providing an abundance of interesting public policy material. It is not random that these crises have continued to divide us. This term appointees are not containing him, nor is Congress, laws, or the bureaucratic civil service or so called “deep state” which it turns out just meant anyone who was doing their job in the federal government. We are seeing much more ominous signs, scrapping of independent civil service that represents the people’s interests, an entire branch of government (Congress) that has abdicated it’s powers when the founding fathers expected their ambitions if not their sense of what is right to check other branches. People are being disappeared without Due Process, by unidentified people who could be vigilantes, a man pretending to be a police officer or actual federal agents. Who would know? The third branch of government has granted the President immunity. He has pardoned violent rioters.
When I was in 6th grade, we observed Mt. St Helens erupt 41-miles North of us. We would stand on the roof, and occasionally a layer of ash would blanket the city. In the Colorado high country, the past 8 years in Washington D.C. were mostly a distant volcano. Most of us have been spectators in our privileged lives here. Again today, I observe Washington D.C. from a distance, and from my current perch, observe various approaches my peers take to similar challenges from one valley to the next, from one organization to the next. There no longer seems much to compare.
I see now, I wrote columns to inoculate my peers from what I saw as dangerous rhetoric and behaviors while celebrating what is so right in our communities due to ordinary people doing their jobs. In April, I contemplated how current behaviors in the Oval Office now would appear and be addressed if they occurred in your town. Likely, leaders with much less skill would be prosecuted and behind bars for self-dealing and corruption, or at least soon be defrocked of their position of influence. We have spent a century without a system of bribes, major fraud and corruption because of an independent civil service system and robust rule of law. We have spent close to 75 years without scapegoating and ruining careers of people for their political beliefs. I think I have wanted to inoculate our municipal and county leaders from the abhorrent example of leadership set by a cynical approach to governance as if it were possible to create a bulwark between the two.
I am no longer in the minority in my concerns. Either 38% of Americans polled or 45% of Americans polled still approve of the President and his approach after celebrating his birthday with a military parade, sending Marines to Los Angeles following peaceful protests (this was hardly Rodney King verdict day, folks), imposing tariffs that threaten our individual financial security and failing to deliver on every promise to deliver on “Day 1” including his self-limiting statement “Except for Day 1,” I won’t be a dictator.
Like Jack Johnson, I have to ask, “where’d all the good people go?”
