Colorado Springs

I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a town I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Colorado Springs is the home of NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), which is located under a mountain outside of town where at the touch of a finger the missiles will fly towards whoever our current enemy is. It is also home to Peterson Field, an Air Force Base, and the Air Force Academy, where male cadets harass and rape the female cadets with impunity. As if that weren’t enough, in the early 1990s the town also became the headquarters of Focus on the Family, the reactionary Christian organization that lobbies against equal rights for everyone except themselves. James Dobson, the founder (who George Lakoff uses as his example of the “strict father figure of the family” that the Republican right has been so successful in promoting) is carried on thousands of radio stations and has published millions of books. Not surprisingly, Ted Haggard, another Colorado Springs-based evangelical minister, who was one of the loudest denigrators of equal rights for homosexuals, was not too long ago outed by a body builder in Denver who said the minister had paid him for sex.

My mother, who lived in Colorado Springs until her death in 1997, was a member of the Unitarian Church and used to threaten to shoot Will Perkins, a big-name car dealer who had been one of the organizers of the initiative to get an anti-gay amendment on the state ballot. She figured since she was already in her eighties, if they arrested her it was unlikely they’d execute her, and she was prepared to die in jail. She had joined PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Gays and Lesbians) after my younger sister revealed she was a lesbian, but being a Unitarian was probably enough impetus on its own. She was a Jew, actually, but came from an assimilated family, and my father, raised a Methodist, called himself an agnostic. So they joined the Unitarian Church when we were kids, and both my sisters and I became members of the youth group, LRY (Liberal Religious Youth) and learned all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll there. When some members of the Jewish Conservative temple in town decided to break away and form a Reform congregation, their kids came to the Unitarian Church for Sunday school until their building was finished. So there is that element in Colorado Springs as well, but the casual observer would never be aware of it.

Most people go there as tourists, to enjoy its spectacular setting at the foot of Pikes Peak, and visit all the sites: the cog railroad to the top of the Peak, Cave of the Winds, Seven Falls, Manitou Springs, etc. When I was in high school I was a lifeguard at one of the motels in Manitou, where tourists from Kansas and Texas all stayed. The motel was owned by a husband and wife, who were probably in their late fifties at the time, and unlike other motel owners in Manitou or anywhere else, considered it their responsibility to guard their guests while swimming. But you know how it is at motels. Families go off to sightsee during the day and come in for a dip in the late afternoon, and that’s about it. So I spent a lot of time sitting around an empty pool playing gin rummy with the owners’ son, who was about fourteen, and who cultivated a weirdness that manifest itself in black clothing and an encyclopedic knowledge of cult horror movies. I was also his designated partner for meals, at various restaurants around the neighborhood, as his parents never seemed to leave the motel. But I was compensated for being saddled with the weird kid by being allowed to have my friends come swim in the pool, getting all my girlfriends hired as maids, and essentially becoming a member of the family.

But Colorado Springs isn’t what it used to be, and the motel, actually made of Spanish-style adobe, with individual rooms and suites centered around a central plaza-like area where the original owner, the kid’s grandmother, had apparently hosted great barbecues and parties for guests who came every year to vacation at her establishment at the foot of Pikes Peak, was losing business to the more modern motels and hotels that were being built by the developers taking advantage of the booming economy. The coup de grace, however, was when the wife died of cancer and the husband didn’t have the heart to keep going. He sold the motel to investors from Texas, and the first thing they did was tell me they wouldn’t be keeping a lifeguard. They offered me a job as a maid instead. But a week into my new job I put a bedspread on sideways and they fired me.

I left Colorado Springs right after high school, although when I dropped out of college I ended up back home for a stint until I left for good for New Mexico. But I often go back to visit, of course. My mom was there, my older sister eventually came back, and my younger sister ended up living in Denver. Also, my best friend from high school, who I got hired as a maid at the motel, also came back and lived there for a long time. There are some good thrift stores, and the downtown, although rather deserted these days, is still beautiful, with its wide, tree-lined streets that run north into the neighborhood of old mansions that were once owned by those who made it rich on the gold and silver mines. Now the town sprawls to the east, subdivision after subdivision, dividing the land into tracts of ranch style or split-level houses where I guess all the evangelicals live. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe they now live in the mansions with their new-found wealth along with their new-found religion.

But I still hate the town. On one visit Mark and I went back to my high school, Roy J. Wasson, where mediocrity ruled and the sensitive suffered. I had him take a picture of me standing on a wall in front of the school name giving it the finger. Silly, but somewhat cathartic.

Solution: You can’t go home again.

Enlightenment/Progress

Sometimes, when I’m stuck in city traffic, wandering the grocery store isle dedicated to high fructose corn syrup products, or fruitlessly trying to wend my way through recorded messages on the telephone, I imagine that Henry David Thoreau, Jean Jacque Rousseau, or Simone Weil were risen from the dead and there beside me to commiserate. The shock would probably kill them again, however. Despite all their prescient warnings that have been passed down in inspired writings over the decades and centuries, even they would not believe what we have wrought.

In his famous Discourse, The Origin of Inequality, Rousseau asks what it is that created the difference between “men and brutes,” and came to the conclusion that it is the “faculty of self-improvement,” why man alone is liable to grow into a dotard and makes him “at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature.” Not a great endorsement of progress, reflection, or our entire historical record. He and Voltaire are credited with bringing Enlightenment to an 18th century European world defined by tyranny, but Voltaire didn’t believe, any more than Rousseau did, that there was much hope for the dotard: “Enlightened times will only enlighten a small number of honest men; the common people will always be fanatical.”

Apparently the American founding fathers didn’t think much better of the common people than Voltaire when they created our representative republic and established the electoral college so the common people’s vote could be overruled by the aristocratic vote. They may have thought they were throwing off their European shackles during the American Revolution, but they were quick to identify themselves as the new elites of the vast American continent, ready to conquer the “savages” (Native Americans) and the wilderness, not to mention expanding their agricultural economy on the backs of their slaves.

While the abolitionists and Transcendentalists of the 19th century sought to enlighten American society to the evils of slavery and European religion and culture, Thoreau also talks about humanity distinguishing itself from the “brute beasts” through an unsuccessful striving for “purity.” I can just imagine him, more than Rousseau or Voltaire, who both led what he would probably have called “impure” lives, plunked down in the middle of a shopping mall in Los Angeles, crying out, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

All my life choices have been based on finding that simplicity—avoiding consumer culture by living in the closest thing to its last vestige in northern New Mexico. Then I get here and I end up fighting the environmental “purists” who tell me that the indigenous folks who live up here aren’t pure anymore because they want to continue to harvest trees for firewood and graze their cattle on public lands that used to belong to them. The only thing pure is their environmentalism sin gente, which would like to consign everyone to town and consumer culture so we don’t pollute the wilderness. Civilization becomes the scourge of nature.

Raymond Williams said, in his essay Problems in Materialism and Culture, “It will be ironic if one of the last forms of the separation between abstracted man and abstracted nature is an intellectual separation between economics and ecology. It will be a sign that we are beginning to think in some necessary ways when we can conceive these becoming, as they ought to become, a single discipline.”

Thoreau, these environmentalists, and even the postmodernists fall into the trap of assigning progress an a-political, historically sweeping definition that negates the need to continually pursue a just and equitable world with small, but insistent victories. As I said in my introduction, there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves, that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. You don’t have to label it progress, but you do have to constantly evaluate it as a kind of enlightenment that allows an increasing number of us to flourish.