Let's All Get a Piece of the Action!

It's coming. Do you know what's coming? Another anniversary, that's what's coming.

Before I talk about disturbing qualities of that anniversary, I have to say: what happened on that day truly was terrible, and the thousands of people who died certainly didn't deserve what happened to them. Nor do their survivors deserve to go through what they've had to go through (for details, read Gail Sheehy's over-long and under-edited Middletown, America). I've inserted that caveat because I have no desire to become Ward Churchill.

Matt is always after me to not let tragedies that have no connection to me have control over my thoughts or life. He's right, of course. It's so easy to want to grab a piece of the tragedy of others because those of us who have middle-class white collar lifestyles tend to live a very even existence, punctuated only by the change of seasons, annual vacations, and the occasional death, birth, or wedding (we're going to one next week!). This vacuum--and of course, I realize that billions of people would love to have our humdrum lives instead of the poverty- and disease-stricken lives they lead, never thinking of it as a vacuum--shows itself in the popularity of shows like "Storm Stories" on The Weather Channel, or the umpteen-thousand shows on Discovery and its spinoff networks about tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, failures in human engineering (collapsing bridges and dams), and other juicy events (some of which haven't even happened yet, we're so jonesing for disaster).

But the ultimate collective juicy event, the ur-event of American life in the twenty-first century, happened nearly four years ago on a sunny September morning. Those two little ones--forming the numeral 11 in some sort of weird symmetry to the towers--pop up everywhere because everyone wants a piece of the action. If you're at all a visual person, you can see 9/11 by glancing at a page of text for just a second or two.

Lately I've been playing a little game. Before I read a book I think: will this author mention September 11 or not? What on earth about the subject matter of this book can be tied into September 11? How will this writer tie her- or himself into what happened on that day? I play this game because the odds are, if it's a non-fiction book with a copyright date of 2002 or later, September 11 will be mentioned.

Examples:

1. Linked, a summary of the new science of networks by a Hungarian mathematician called Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Networks are a new way of looking at previously un-connectable phenomena, and it's a very interesting concept, and the book is a highly-readable summary of what math and science have discovered over the past several years. Near the end, looking for examples, Barabasi starts talking about terror networks, and sure enough, I spotted those two little ones in my peripheral vision before I came to the actual paragraph.

2. Call of the Mall, by Paco Underhill. This guy is fun to read--his big book Why We Buy came out five or six years ago, and is a must-read if you're a retailer. This book came out in 2003 or 2004, and sure enough: malls no longer have lockers for people to put packages into while they continue to shop because of September 11.

3. Subwayland, by Randy someone-or-other (I'm too lazy to go looking for the book upstairs). Okay, this one is obvious--a book about the New York subway system has to have an entire chapter devoted to what happened to the 1 & 9 lines on that day.

4. The Science of Good & Evil, by Michael Shermer. This book by the editor of Skeptic magazine is about how ethics are a product of evolution, not religion. I read it in January, but don't remember all of the details. But I looked just now, and sure enough there's a reference to September 11 in the index.

5. What's the Matter with Kansas, by Thomas Frank. This political bestseller from last year is another obvious one.

The point is: it's fine to talk about September 11 if you're writing about George W. Bush, about American foreign policy, about fundamentalist thought, and a host of other subjects directly related to the causes of what happened. But can we please give it a rest everywhere else, unless we're writing a detailed sociological examination of the day's effect on the American psyche?

What happened on that day was horrible. But so was what happened in London recently, in Madrid last year, and in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and a lot of other places in 1945 (those nuclear anniversaries are coming up--hooray!). The list of man's inhumanity to man is endless and it's not yet complete. But too many Americans think that the event was unique. Sorry, guys and gals--it wasn't. And unless you were there, shut up already.

In another posting perhaps I'll get into American Exceptionalism, which is probably the root cause of all this, but this one is long enough....

Wrestling with Angels

The other day I heard a terrible story. Matt has a friend (who shall remain nameless) who is Muslim. Last Saturday her mosque on Parker Road was the target of a charming group of people who call themselves "Operation Save America." They use two names, depending on whom they're targeting--their other name is Operation Rescue, and anyone who pays attention knows what they're about. Using a portable PA system, they--with the kind permission of the always helpful Arapahoe County Sherriff Department--told good Muslims arriving for worship that Islam is a lie, that theirs is a culture of death, etc.--all of the usual right wing anti-Muslim hate mongering that you can hear on talk radio any day of the week. Except that right-wing talk radio doesn't set up a portable broadcasting truck in front of mosques (not that that makes them morally any better, of course).

I'm no fan of religion--any religion--but I would never presume to spew hate speech at people arrriving for church (Operation Save America's efforts continued on Sunday, when they protested outside of the largely gay & lesbian Metropolitan Community Church, a Unitarian fellowship, and--get this--St. John's Episcopal, the premier Protestant "establishment" church in Denver). They're in Denver, you see, for their week-long annual convention/hate fest. Last year they targeted Columbus, Ohio, I believe, with similar tactics. They're not going home until the weekend--this morning they caused a traffic jam on I-25 by standing on an overpass with pictures of aborted fetuses. It's a wonder they didn't cause multiple wrecks, even a few deaths.

I'll get to my point in a minute, but first I want to say: these people are patently un-American. They believe they're representing a "true" America, but their America never existed, and (if I can do anything about it) never will. Ours is a schizophrenic country, to be sure--founded jointly by hard-boiled Puritans and easier-going (but slave owning) Cavaliers--and these twin foundings have colored much of our civil strife over four centuries. But in our wonderful Constitution is the concept that anyone who believes differently from the majority still has a right to believe (and testify) as he or she wishes. They will change that if they get the chance.

Operation Save America/Operation Rescue hate life. Oh, sure, they claim that human life--the life of millions of unborn fetuses--is their highest priority. But as a gay man I've come to recognize certain psychological patterns that are dead give-aways. Any man who claims "disgust" at gay sex is generally fascinated by it. I should know--I once claimed such disgust when I was young and scared by my own sexuality. Extending that to these anti-life pro-lifers, I'd say that rather than embracing life, they despise life. They scream, they shout, they kill--not because they value life but because they don't value it. To borrow from (very) popular culture: they're Voldemort's Death Eaters.

* * * * *

I ranted against them just now to get the anger out of my system. Because the central point of this posting isn't that these awful people exist in our society--we've known they do for some time. It's that we on the left don't know how to deal with them. And it's that there is a way to deal with them that doesn't always work in the way we might want it to work, but over time, if we keep doing this, we may cause a societal psychological shift that will benefit everyone.

And that strategy is: don't argue. I can't remember which political book I was reading over the past year where it dawned on me that people on the right--far more than people on the left, but we're not immune--argue for argument's sake. It doesn't matter if they're right or they're provably wrong--they won't stop arguing. It's as though they get stuck in a negative feedback loop from which self-extrication is impossible: if you're right it means I'm wrong, but I'm not wrong, so whatever you say has to be wrong and whatever I say has to be right, even if you're actually right and I'm actually wrong. It's that old binary, black and white thing that the left graduated from (for the most part) decades ago when they realized that Marxism/Leninism was a dead end. Conservatives can't see shades of gray, so when you argue, you can never win. They don't believe in the concept of consensus--only competition. Of course, I sound awfully black & white when I say this, but please refer to an earlier post where I put in a disclaimer about self-contradiction.

How did the mosque handle this challenge? Unfortunately, they chose to fight argument with argument. Matt's friend had a much more practical suggestion: run over to Costco, buy bottled water and cookies in bulk, and hand them out to the Operation Save America people (it was, after all, a day of record-breaking heat--we topped out at 102 degrees on Saturday). Smile at them--be courteous and sweet. Had they pursued this course of action, they might not have changed any minds, but they might just have planted the seeds of doubt. They will come to doubt the wisdom of their leaders when they see with their own eyes that their enemies are no different from themselves. I have this naive, Anne Frank attitude that deep down most people want to do the right thing. The members of Operation Save America and similar organizations and churches are seriously off track, but they're not inhuman. Appeal to their better nature and they might, some day, surprise us.

It won't happen right away, of course. This is the kind of thing that takes years to build. And we may not have years. But if we keep arguing with people who brook no contradiction, we will never prevail.

Maybe this idea sounds like the reaction of the Jews of Europe when confronted by Hitler--I don't know. But the must never give up our ideals--I will never apologize for being gay or secularist or liberal or intellectual or any other label they want to slap onto me. We have to be very firm in fighting these dangerous people, and never forget that if they get their way this country will no longer be America.

Cinderella Can't Go to the Ball Anymore

On the corner of my block is a building that is now a house but which used to be a corner grocery store. You can tell by the architecture that it was once so, but for years the sign on the sign of the building has been painted over. Today I noticed that either the owner of the building is trying to remove layers of paint to expose the old sign, or else the hot weather is causing the paint to peel off. The word "GROCERY" is now clearly visible. There are a lot of these old buildings in my neighborhood. Some are now houses, and others are shops selling all kinds of useless, charming things. None of them sells food anymore, because now we have grocery stores. The old buildings' original purpose has become obsolete.

That got me thinking about obsolete uses for commercial buildings (yes, I do think about things like this--I'm a real estate nerd). I'm 43 years old, which is not old enough to be old, but is older than young, and I can now look back and see how things have changed in my home town. The Denver in which I grew up is largely gone. It's not just that the metro area has added more than a million new people since I was a child (in fact, the area has just about doubled in size). It's that the malls of my youth are, for the most part, history.

Those of you who know me know that I wrestle all the time between being a complete materialist and castigating those in our society who seemingly live to spend. Lately I've been swinging more toward the latter position (as in last week's post about Flatiron Crossing), but from time to time I swing back and spend more than I should. I like to embrace this contradiction, because to be completely consistent is to be boring.

I've always been fascinated by shopping malls. When I was ten years old my favorite after school activity was to go with my mother and my friends Kevin and/or Marty to a shopper's paradise known as "Cinderella City" (yes, I know what you're thinking, and it's true!). People who have moved to Denver in the past decade have no idea how important this mall was to the Denver area's collective psyche in the 1960s and 1970s. This mall was the BIG TIME--the largest mall between Chicago and Los Angeles, the place where everyone went shopping for everything. It was torn down about a decade ago, after a long twilight period where the mall's vacancy rate slowly got higher and higher.

But oh, how wonderful this place was in its heyday. It had four anchor stores upon opening: Joslin's (a Denver chain later absorbed by Dillard's), JC Penney (known then as "Penney's"), The Denver Dry (a Denver chain later absorbed by the May Company, and now known as Foley's), and Neusteter's (Denver's answer to Saks). There was a two-level Woolworth and a Twin Cinema (Denver's second multiplex, after the Villa Italia Twin). There was high-end (Joseph Magnin, Lillie Rubin) and low-end. There was the magical odor emanating from Orange Julius, a mixture of hotdog and citrus and malt. There was Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, and Taco Bueno (a fast-food subsidiary of Casa Bonita), and Burstein-Applebee Records. There was Hatch's Gifts (with a window filled with futuristic fiber-optic lights) and Hatch's Books (in the pre-Tattered Cover era, Denver's best independent bookstore chain). And there was that thundering fountain in the very center of the mall that was so loud that you couldn't speak in a normal tone of voice, and that moved so much water that that part of the mall was always more humid (and chlorinated) than the rest of the center.

The mall failed mostly for the usual reason that malls fail: changing times. Southwest Plaza opened in 1983 and pulled most of the middle class shoppers out, leaving only lower-income shoppers (this was long after most of the higher-end stores such as Neusteter's had gone away).

But it also failed because it was hard work to shop at Cinderella City. Instead of the dumbbell design common in the 1960s, with anchor stores at each end, with one or more in the middle, Cinderella City was a giant "W." To get from Joslin's at one end of the W to Neusteter's at the other required a 15- to 20-minute walk on concrete floors. You'd walk the length of the Gold Mall (each segment was color-coded so you couldn't get lost, unless you were colorblind). After a left turn at Penney's, you'd enter the the Blue Mall, at the center of which was the double-height Blue Room with its thunderous fountain and Orange Julius. From the Blue Room you'd turn right and go past The Denver Dry (in 1974 or so shortened to just "The Denver"). Finally you'd turn left again at the start of the Rose Mall, at the far end of which was Neusteter's.

Ah, but there was also downstairs. Below the Rose Mall lay the Shamrock Mall--but you'd never know it, because the architect didn't put in any visual connection--the Shamrock Mall was (ironically, since it was named for a growing thing) subterranean and self-contained, with connecting escalators only at one end. Never full, at its peak the Shamrock Mall probably boasted 80% occupancy. Below the Gold Mall was (originally) the also ironically-named Sunflower Mall (and to get from Shamrock to Sunflower you had to ascend stairs, go through the Blue Room, and then go back downstairs after traipsing down past Penney's again). But that name didn't last, because the mall ownership could never quite get anyone to sign a lease there (except the Barbizon School of Beauty--a heavy advertiser on Channel 2, during its re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie, That Girl, and Hogan's Heroes).

So beginning in about 1972 (the mall had opened in 1966 or 1967) they changed course. They carved out little Olde English streets in what had been unused retail space to create "Cinder Alley." This quaint little village was filled with tiny little shoppes--not much bigger than suburban family rooms. You could buy bratwurst and ginger beer from a tiny German restaurant, or fine batch-roased coffees and teas. There was a seashell shop at which I was a regular customer. It was extremely charming, and so successful initially that the mall management expanded it greatly, filling most of the old Sunflower Mall.

But it didn't last. Like the process I described last week, slowly things began to fail. Cinder Alley was filled with small businesses, and when the economy got weak under Nixon, Ford and Carter, they couldn't make it. The rest of the mall started losing its chain stores, and it filled up with lava lamp emporiums and places to buy waterbeds, role-play board games, and bongs. In the 1980s the mall ownership attempted to revivify the mall by slapping down oak parquet over the concrete. They also removed the fountain to create an opening down into a new food court that linked, for the first time, Cinder Alley and the Shamrock Mall (in space previously devoted to parking). To replace Neusteter's and the Twin Cinema, both long since shuttered, they brought in Broadway Southwest, a fairly upscale department store chain from Phoenix that tried to make a go of it in Denver for a few years. But the writing was on the wall.

After The Denver was absorbed by May D&F (pre-Foley's), the new owners decided to shut the store, leaving a big, empty hole. Broadway Southwest shut down just a few years after it opened. Cinder Alley was long gone, the quaint streets and lamps having been ripped out to install a giant children's indoor playground called "Nathan's Funtastic," or some such. Montgomery Ward (remember them?) replaced the Denver for a few years, but ultimately people just stopped coming.

The City of Englewood worked out a deal with the owners of the mall, and (except for Broadway Southwest) the whole giant pile was torn down and replaced by a Wal-Mart-anchored neighborhood center and some apartments. The Broadway Southwest was turned into Englewood's City Hall and Library. RTD installed a stop at the western end of the property when they extended Light Rail down Santa Fe Drive in the mid-1990s. Except for the odd diagonal orientation of City Hall (diagonal to the city streets, that is), there's no trace of what used to be the pride of Denver.

Okay, that's now two postings about malls. I promise not to make this a mall blog.

The Tolling of the Bell

On the afternoon of Independence Day Matt and I paid a visit to Flatiron Crossing, a Denver-area shopping mall. I was going to post this when I got back, but I was lazy, and kept putting it off until now.

Flatiron Crossing, your days are numbered.

This is a young mall, as malls go. It opened in the summer of 2000, to much fanfare. Located in the then-growing high technology corridor along US-36 between Denver and Boulder, the mall's neighborhoods include the headquarters of Level3, a fiber-optics company, Sun Microsystems' second-largest facility outside of their California headquarters, and StorageTek, a maker of computer backup systems (soon to merge with Sun). The demographics were marvellous--the mall would pull from highly-educated Boulder, where the aging Crossroads Mall would soon be closing, and from the vast new affluent subdivisions in Boulder County, Jefferson County, and even Weld County. These subdivisions--Rock Creek chief among them--are "planned" communities, which means they're sprawl, but they're pretty sprawl, with lovely parkways planted with trees and dramatic ornamental shrubs and grasses, and bronze sculptures of small white children at play. When you drive over the hill on US-36 just past Flatiron Crossing, you see vast miles of rooftops filling what were, until about 10 years ago, empty green fields. Former Coloradoans who come back for a visit are of course appalled at this sight. So are those of us who haven't moved away.

But back to the mall itself. When it opened, Flatiron wasn't 100% leased--most new malls aren't. Even in the golden era of enclosed malls--those 20 or so years between 1965 and The Cosby Show--they were never 100% full. But, everyone assumed, more new stores would open, and the mall would become the new economic engine for the northwest quadrant of the Denver area (replacing the aging Westminster Mall). But something went wrong. In the aftermath of the dot-com crash (which happened a few months before the mall opened), not many new stores opened beyond the original mix. The mall started missing its sales projections (of course, mall ownership put the best face on the bad news, and most mall shoppers really didn't care about how well the merchants were doing anyway).

Now the mall itself is showing serious signs of decline. One of the anchor spots is empty, because Lord & Taylor (a division of the seriously ailing May Company) decided that it shouldn't be in Colorado at all, and closed all three Denver area stores). When you see the former L&T space, it's a black void--they didn't bother to cover over the glass front. Outside the mall is "The Village," a "street" of shops that aren't connected by an enclosed space but instead face onto a landscaped block-long passageway. This was the most difficult part to lease, because it's cold in the winter, and this part of the Denver area is prone to especially high winds year-round thanks to its location near the foothills and its high elevation. But now the "Village" is emptying out in a serious way. It still has its AMC 14-plex, and its Borders. But Organized Living is having a going-out-of-business sale. Several other stores have closed too; the entire "street" is only about 55% full. The mall ownership is trying to fight back by re-doing the landscaping, and upgrading the paving from plain cement to colored cement bricks.

Back inside the mall, it's clear the owners are desperate to fill the space with anything they can. A former high-tech electronics store (I think it was Bose, but it could have been Bang & Olafsen) is now filled with ugly sparkly party gowns for big-haired suburban Republican divas to wear to their Junior League balls. The shop owner didn't even bother to remodel the space--it looks like it should be selling speakers, and the carpet looks worn out. The mall is starting to get several of these kinds of tenants--locals who try, but will probably fail, at making a go of it in what have to be fairly expensive spaces. And the kiosks that so irritatingly fill the mall's corridors (irritating because they get in everyone's way) are starting to look especially junky. One is devoted entirely to Tupperware, another to $10 sunglasses. In front of Restoration Hardware the mall has allowed a local kitchen remodeler to set up a mock kitchen counter. In short, the mall--carefully designed to look like a giant mountain lodge, with tasteful slate floors, grand wooden columns, and whimsical light fixtures--is turning into an "anything goes" environment.

Of course, that's nature's way. Weeds will fill the spaces in between your petunias seemingly overnight if you let them. And even if they're likely going to fail, I say "more power" to these local entrepreneurs who think they can make a go of it in a place filled with national chain stores that primarily cater to fickle teenagers.

But what this highlights is the ultimate unsustainability of the amount and variety of retail choices we Americans have. Since much of what gets bought is paid for years later--average credit card debt is more than $10,000--at some point most people will have to get off the decades-long spending spree we've been on, and start paying for better schools and better transportation systems, and, for that matter, paying for the stuff they've bought, taken home, used, and thrown away.

That this is happening so soon at Flatiron--it used to be that most malls were good for 15-20 years before being torn down--may be an indication that the process is accelerating, that the chickens are coming home to roost (to use that Ward Churchillian phrase--he teaches just 10 miles away) (and no, I'm not a fan) sooner rather than later.

Yesterday the New York Times carried an article about how strong the retail sector was for the month of June, led (for a change) by Wal-Mart. Sure it was strong--there was, according to the retail gurus, a "pent-up demand" leftover from May, when the weather around the country was less conducive to shopping. But it won't be strong forever.

What Happened in London

What happened in London had, despite everything Mr. Blair, Mr. Bush, and others have said, has nothing to do with attacking "freedom" and the "way of life" of the British, just as 9/11 had nothing to do with attacking American freedom or the American way of life. On Thursday morning the first thing I heard from the PM was something along those lines, just as though it had been scripted by one of Bush's speechwriters (Bush, judging by his stumbling comments that morning, must have loaned his traveling speechwriter out to Mr. Blair). I started talking back to the TV, never a good sign.

The attacks of 7/7 were all about British support for US imperialism in the Middle East, from which (Mr. Blair believes) the UK benefits. The attacks of 9/11 were all about having American soldiers in Islamic holy lands, about American support of the corrupt House of Saud, about American support of Israeli crimes, and a variety of other things that have nothing to do with the American way of life. Or maybe I should say they have everything to do with the American way of life, because our foreign policy is designed to keep the masses happy by providing cheap oil. That commodity is what allows us to cut ourselves off from each other in our cars and SUVs, to transport Chinese-made shoes cheaply across our vast territory, to fill our Wal-Marts with cheap TVs assembled in far-off countries, and to do a lot of other things that ultimately will come back to bite us.

But getting back to what Mr. Blair said: it's the duty of every right-thinking person to challenge those words and those thoughts. In conversations with friends and co-workers, you have to bring up this idea: it's our (collective Western) foreign policy that they hate, not our forms of government or even our decadent, supposedly immoral lifestyle. It's our actions. To change our actions, we have to do everything we can to 1.) become less dependent on foreign oil and cheap consumer goods imports; and 2.) elect a set of politicians that won't be servants of the multi-national corporations (this is true of nearly all Republicans and most Democrats). Do you really need that new Samsung plasma TV? Do you really want to take advantage of GM's employee discount program--can't you get a few more years out of your current car?

Born on the Fourth of July

If you've read the description, you get that this is going to be an eclectic blog--I'm a Gemini, and I'm interested in everything except most of contemporary American popular culture (although I should say I'm interested enough in it to deplore it). Maybe that's why I'm so late to start a blog. It won't, I hope, just be a mish-mash of stuff that no one finds interesting. My own interests are quite specific, and once I've decided I like something, I can really get passionate about it.

Take, for example, my EastEnders fixation. I'm an American, so I don't get it four times a week the way people living in the UK do. In order to get my fix, I have to watch it on my local public TV station, KBDI-12 (Denver). In order for them to keep airing it (2 episodes per week only, not the four seen in Britain), I have to, from time to time, donate to the station (anyone reading this outside of the US: there is very little support for public television from the government, and what there is of it has recently been hijacked by the right wing). A few weeks ago KBDI had a pledge drive, and so I gave them $100. As a thank you gift, they sent me a copy of EastEnders: 20 Years in Albert Square. It arrived Friday, and by Saturday night I had read the whole thing cover-to-cover.

This fixation is despite the fact that the EE episodes KBDI is currently showing are six years old (UK readers: Matthew hasn't gone on trial yet, the Slaters are only a thought in the back of some producer's brain, and Grant still hasn't taken Courtney to Rio). Of course, I know who the Slaters are--EE was on BBC America until about 16 months ago when they yanked it for low ratings. Eventually, KBDI's episodes will get caught up to the point where I started watching EE on BBC America, and so I'll get to watch them all over again--watch Ethel's assisted suicide, Jim's marriage proposal to Dot, Barry's brutal treatment of Pat after Roy's death, etc. (Denver readers: I'm sorry for the spoilers). And yes, I know about Dish Network's pay-per-view, but I'll stick with cable for now.

Another example of my devotion to things that I really, really like: I'm one of those people who often re-read Lord of the Rings. You, if you had known me in the 1970s when I was in what was then generally called "Junior High," but now is called "Middle School," would have seen me reading one of the three volumes every day of the week during the lunch period. Every day. For three years. I had an English teacher (Jerry Hedges, South High School, Denver) who wisely talked to me about that particular habit, and from then on I didn't read LoTR for several years--once in the 1980s only. In the late 1990s, with Peter Jackson's film announced and produced, I started reading LoTR again, but I limit myself to once per year (usually in the late winter, when I tend to get a bit anxious about life).

But this isn't going to be just a narcissistic blog--I'm very concerned about the state of the world, and will regularly be spouting off about the people running Washington, and on the homegrown idiots here in Colorado. We have quite a few, from the single-issue Congressman who wants to send Mexicans back to Mexico, to the deer-in-the-headlights governor, who, thankfully, will soon be term-limited out of office (it could be worse, I suppose--at least he's not a movie star).

And I'm passionate about history. My co-worker Jeffrey originally gave me the notion that I should do a Denver blog. Whenever I'm with someone in a car, or walking down a downtown sidewalk, I have this irritating habit of saying things like "this building used to be a JC Penney, from the 1930s to about 1945, when they moved two blocks up the street, and that California Street Penney's closed in 1982 when they built the Sixteenth Street Mall" (Denver readers: the building in question is at 16th & Champa, the building with Floyd's Barbershop). But my history postings, if there are any, won't be just about Denver's past. I majored in History and English Literature in college (University of Colorado at Denver, 1999--I was a "non-traditional" student, in my 30s at the time).

The power of corporations will also be a theme of this blog, I think. Last year I was part of a local group that was one of several that worked to stop Wal-Mart from opening one of their "Neighborhood Grocery" stores in my part of Denver (West Highlands--the store would have been built on the site of the old Elitch Gardens parking lot, at 38th and Wolff). Wal-Mart pulled out after about five months of angry public meetings, a flock of yellow "Stop Elitch Wal-Mart" yard signs, and lots of phone calls and petitions. But it's hardly just Wal-Mart. They may be the biggest, but there are lots of corporations that are hurting our world more than they're helping it.

My motivation is to hear from others, to find out if I'm just a cantankerous grump or if I'm onto something. One thing to know about me, however: I try to see both sides of issues. I think a lot of fellow liberals fail when they refuse to listen to what conservatives have to say (and vice versa, of course). You don't have to change your beliefs when you listen to them--but you owe them (and they owe you) the decency of a hearing. Dialogue will accomplish a lot in our world if we'd only let it. When I was younger I tended to be more strident in my beliefs--but now I recognize that we all inhabit the same planet.