I love Boulder, and Jefferson County. I’ve been living here for nearly a month, meeting you all and coming to understand this community. I’ve been astounded and confounded by the care you show each other, and by the many commitments you take on, seemingly anew each day, to create this place.
I like to think The Monitor plays some role in this work, and that, as record and calendar and crier, we help cultivate some shared awareness to help you face challenges as they come.
From my extremely limited exposure, I’d say you are better prepared for these challenges than most. There is an interconnectedness and civility here that I wasn’t sure existed anymore in these United States. Even in the most heated exchanges I’ve witnessed (looking at you, Clancy), people challenge each other factually, not personally or rashly. I wish the entire world could take note of how you conduct yourselves.
For there is something ill at work in American public discourse, and in journalism more broadly, that you seemingly have no tolerance for. The American free press was once the envy of the world, but many news outlets now seem to platform messaging instead of news — reporting selectively to create neatly packaged storytelling that caters to the political leanings of their readership. And their staff. Language is very carefully chosen and facts and happenings very carefully selected to create a marketable product, and to fit the news to a predetermined narrative. This has become exceptionally pronounced since President Trump’s election in 2016, and has played a significant part in making our national politics increasingly fraught and uncompromising.
Meanwhile, locally focused media like The Monitor are either shuttering or being consolidated under large conglomerates. This means local news coverage is becoming increasingly homogenous, or disappearing altogether. This is very bad, for all of us.
It’s bad because people are being driven to increasingly politicized representations of the news, and of our shared problems. The radicalization of the American electorate, both left and right, is no longer a fringe concern. Those of us who might consider ourselves centrists often feel we have increasingly smaller audiences and increasingly fewer allies — even though political moderates still represent over a third of the nation’s population. If all degrades to discerning between enemy and friend, those who don’t fall neatly to either category become enemy to all. Patience and an appreciation for nuance can be accused as fence sitting, or, worse, a mark of your tolerance for evil.
This thinking is poisonous, and yet popular. Take Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old serviceman who eight days ago set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. He meant his death as an act of protest against the Israeli response in Gaza to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Regardless of your thoughts on the conflict, I feel one should be concerned with the reality that an American soldier, with a top secret security clearance, was radicalized on an issue, any issue, to the degree of self-immolation.
Perhaps he was mentally ill; the facts are still being established. But as they are, one should be nonetheless shocked by this radical empathy that extends to people thousands of miles away, but not your own neighbors. I am sad this young man died, but at the heart of his decision is something extremely dark— and increasingly visible— in America and we should make an effort to understand how this, and other such protests, are happening.
I think part of the solution to our increasingly toxic and dangerous national conversation is right here in Boulder and Jefferson County. I have gotten to see you living with and for one another, and what you have accomplished here as a community is truly precious. I am glad to have moved here, and hope we might find a way to export some of the brilliance of this place to the rest of the country.
