While most eyes are on Denver this week a few stray folks, say, 120 million Al Jazeera viewers and the local residents of the wonderful city of Golden, CO, had the pleasure of viewing the 1st Amendment in action last night with a patriotic display by our country’s finest specimens in action.
Even though Al Jazeera has a presence at the DNC in Denver the network wanted to highlight a typical small American town that had character, physical beauty and close proximity to Denver. Golden, my home for 15 years, has all of these characteristics, plus a few characters to spare. And with that, the lines were drawn.
Forgive me. This diary is a bit heavy on the pictures but Golden is a very scenic place and the pictures largely speak for themselves. So, jump...
Golden. Gateway to Adventure in the lovely foothills leading into the Rocky Mountains. Great place to live, work and play. Al Jazeera wanted a taste of this to show their audience how typical Americans live. Well, once it was announced that Golden was hosting the network and that they would be interviewing people at the local Buffalo Rose bar the letters of support and detraction came rolling in. Predictably one side supported this act of hospitality as a way of showing off our little town to the greater world or as a show of support for the 1st Amendment. The other side, sadly predictable, equated Al Jazeera with "the terrorists", or those responsible for 9/11 and other such low-information drivel. One person asked when that Al Jazeera guy was showing up. Jeez!
So, pictorially, welcome to Golden!
Home of Coors
And good taste.
Seriously, it’s usually a classy place with some old west flavor mixed in for good fun. Tonight, with the battle lines drawn the "enlightened" folks boycotting the event were out in force with lots of American flags, blaring car horns, inflammatory signage and rhetoric and enthusiastically exercising their freedom of assembly and free speech rights. Unless, of course, they disagreed with another group then those rights were purely optional. For the other group of course.
I guess the irony of the dichotomy of their actions versus their words was lost on them. The impression I was left with was that if you weren’t supporting their cause then you weren’t a patriotic American. Mmmm, I wonder what political camp these folks fall into?
I suspect that practically everyone attending this event is actually on the same side regardless of their actions. The boycotters, whom I jokingly referred to as low-information, one-dimensional emoticons, are, in reality, solid citizens who are seeing the same situation through entirely different prisms. The obvious anger and ignorance of these folks doesn’t negate the need for all of us to understand the other side(s) and reach out to find common ground. That’s the message coming from Denver this week and it’s a message of hope and progressiveness. A message well worth remembering as we enter the home stretch of this election.
So, greetings from Golden. Still a great place to be. Go Obama!