Patty Limerick

Limerick: Put Critical Race Theory back in the bottle, so we can have a meaningful conversation

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 19:41:43 +0000

Limerick: Put Critical Race Theory back in the bottle, so we can have a meaningful conversation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/21/2021 - 13:41

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on June 21, 2021 By Patty Limerick

The phrase has elicited derision, without understanding

Of all the memorable ways to let a genie out of a bottle, it is hard to beat the maneuver of inventing a phrase and then watching as this phrase races out into the world, refusing every plea to return to the shop for a tune-up. While the phrase is arousing fierce opposition and equally fierce defense, its creator can only repeat a remark that no one hears: “That’s not quite what I meant.”

Having been there and done that, I feel some sympathy for the folks who conjured up the term Critical Race Theory.

I had my first experience with a phrase gone rogue thirty-five years ago. After a Washington Post reporter wrote a story about “Trails: Toward a New Western History,” a conference I had organized in 1987, the phrase, the New Western History, rocketed into visibility.

Objections — usually offered as if they carried stunning insight — rode the same rocket. The New Western History paid too much attention to minorities. It wasn’t actually all that new. New or not, its portrayal of the nation’s westward expansion was far too disillusioning and negative.

One comment I heard from a critic won the prize: “I said everything you said before you did! And everything you say is wrong!”

Compared to Critical Race Theory, the New Western History was a pathetic underachiever when it came to generating an uproar. No president of the United States ever placed me or my phrase in the crosshairs of his rhetorical rage. Not a single state legislator even began to draft a bill to punish K-12 teachers for finding a place for the New Western History in their classrooms.

If it had not been excoriated by former President Donald Trump, and if legislators in various states had not written and passed laws to prohibit teachers from including it in their lesson plans, Critical Race Theory would still be sequestered in universities, traveling around in the closed circuit of professors talking to professors.This distant history leads us to the recognition of a deeply ironic fact.

Escorted into visibility by its opponents, Critical Race Theory never dealt with its big identity problem: hardly anyone knows what it means.

Why, for instance, is it called a theory, when pronouncements by its advocates usually register — not as theories put forward for testing — but as Critical Race Foregone Conclusions?

And why didn’t its opponents ever ask, “Could anyone provide an accessible, de-jargonized definition of this theory that has us all upset?”

If asked this question, I would have offered my best shot at decoding the term: “Critical Race Theory asserts that the injustices built into this nation’s origins await a full reckoning in every sector of American life.”

Racing to outlaw an idea that no one can define or identify with precision, agitated legislators started down a slippery slope. If they don’t interrupt this skid, they may soon be drafting laws to exclude mermaids, dragons, unicorns, and other figures of doubtful existence from the nation’s classrooms.

But why not try a law to reinsert genies into their bottles? Restored to a familiar environment, the genies would feel more at ease and less inclined — actually, unable — to stir up trouble.

Best of all, we humans might be able to figure out what we are actually arguing about.

Patty Limerick can be reached at pnl@centerwest.org, and you can find her blog, “Not My First Rodeo, at the Center of the American West website.

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Patty Limerick: Finding common ground with the Cheney women

Anonymous — Fri, 14 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Patty Limerick: Finding common ground with the Cheney women Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/14/2021 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on May 14, 2021 By Patty Limerick

Before 2021, whenever I heard the name “Cheney,” I was overcome by a compulsion to overgeneralize.

“I know all I need to know about that clan,” I would think, “and I know that I do not like them.”

In the weeks since the Jan. 6 takeover of the U.S. Capitol, Congresswoman Liz Cheney has cured me of the narrowmindedness with which overgeneralization infects its victims.

Representative Cheney has declared that the presidential election of 2020 was not stolen. The time has come, she has insisted, for Republicans to reject Donald Trump’s control of their party. Denounced and threatened by the leadership of the Party and by many of its voters, she holds her ground. Every day, she honors the oath she took to defend the Constitution.

Plus, she is permitting me to recover — in public — from a severe bout of narrowmindedness.

If the Center of the American West retains the ability to host distinguished speakers, I will invite Congresswoman Cheney to visit with us, and I will hope that her father and mother will come with her.

If she accepts this invitation, I will introduce her as a person of principle, integrity, and a deep love of our country. I will also note a few of the issues on which she and I disagree.

We are, for instance, not of one mind when it comes to military interventions in distant locales. Like her father, she wants the United States to be a forceful presence worldwide. Meanwhile, I am stuck in a contradiction: I fully support civilian control of the military, and I worry when people who have never served in the military hold the power to dispatch soldiers to distant wars. To reckon with this muddle, I could not ask for better conversational company than this father-and-daughter pair.

I am just as eager to have the company of Congresswoman Cheney’s mother. From 1986 through 1992, Lynne Cheney was the Chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH). In that era, when debates over Western American history were heated, word reached me that Lynne Cheney’s views on the Western past differed from my own. Embracing the “small world” ties that crisscross the West’s open spaces, I would welcome the chance to find out if my views of history have converged with hers, if hers have converged with mine, or if our views have headed off in new directions entirely.

And here’s the main reason that I believe Congresswoman Liz Cheney and I would enjoy each other’s company: We share a rare ability to maintain our tranquility in situations where others become rattled and anxious.

Though her visibility dwarfs my own, she and I are equally at peace with the role of the maverick. When we realize that we must speak out, we do not hesitate to accept our calling.

While the people who hoped for our silence grow agitated, we grow calmer.

Years ago, folklore informed me that the Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities had renamed me “Backpack Patty.” Since backpacks are infinitely preferable to purses and briefcases, I have always taken this as a compliment.

Lynne Cheney gave me the best nickname I ever had. I would like to have the chance to thank her in person.

Patty Limerick can be reached at pnl@centerwest.org, and you can find her blog, “Not My First Rodeo, at the Center of the American West website.

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Opinion: Secretary Deb Haaland is sure to enrage everyone. She should just embrace it.

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Opinion: Secretary Deb Haaland is sure to enrage everyone. She should just embrace it. Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/25/2021 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on March 25, 2021 By PATTY LIMERICK, LUIS BENITEZ | luis.benitez@state.co.us and ALISON ROSE JEFFERSON

The new secretary of the interior should prioritize the outdoor economy and push for more inclusivity

The Department of the Interior has been nicknamed “the department of everything else.” Since so many secretaries have come from the American West, we Westerners understand where that nickname comes from. Try to think about all the agencies and bureaus contained within the Department of Interior, then grab a bottle of aspirin.

A secretary of the interior must tend to agencies ranging from the Bureau of Reclamation, managing a network of dams that provide water to cities and farms and generate electricity, to the National Park Service, which responds to the desires of vigorous outdoor recreationists and less-vigorous car tourists, while overseeing the preservation and interpretation of the nation’s heritage of places that shape the nation’s sense of identity.

The multiple burdens that land on a Secretary of the Interior’s desk also arise from the internal operations of individual bureaus; the Bureau of Land Management, to use a conspicuous example, is charged with one of the most complicated sets of missions and tasks of any institution on the planet.

This leads us to the bad news that awaits former New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland who was just appointed secretary: with this range of agencies under her supervision, it is guaranteed that almost every action she takes is going to make some people very angry, leaving her with considerable range of choice on which people to make angry on which occasion.

This, in truth, can prove to be liberation. Since it will never work to please everyone, each secretary of the interior soon recognizes that her time in office presents her with extraordinary opportunities to orchestrate unexpected alliances and coalitions. Groups that face off in antagonism on one issue will find themselves aligned in unexpected cooperation (or perhaps indifference) on another issue.

Although there has been some progress in more storytelling and broader participation in decision-making, inclusive practices have happened in hit-or-miss and arbitrary ways. Only 8% of National Register sites and 3% of our National Historic Landmarks represent people of color, women, or members of other marginalized groups.

Under Haaland’s prospective leadership, Interior could finally take up a purposeful and thorough broadening of inclusivity in the outdoors and heritage spaces. The National Park Service oversees the preservation, protection, and interpretation of our nation’s heritage, within our parks and in communities across the nation. Guiding a national historic preservation program that engages all Americans with the places and stories that make up our national identity, the Park Service can tell the whole of our story, for the first time.

Haaland will have a unique chance to bridge the divide for an ecosystem and an economy, a divide that has been, for too long, accepted with fatalism. The outdoor recreation industry accounts for 2.1% of our Gross Domestic Product (over $458 Billion) surpassing industries such as mining, utilities, farming and ranching, and chemical products manufacturing. It is responsible for over 5 million American jobs.

Despite occasional efforts to pay attention, the lack of a dynamic political voice for this economy has been a feature of Interior’s “old normal.” And yet, at the state level, governors have started paying attention. Currently, 16 states have an office of outdoor recreation industry that is at once complementary to and different from typical “parks and recreation” or “parks and wildlife” offices. These offices provide oversight to economic development responding to the ever-increasing public enthusiasm for outdoor recreation, partner with existing agencies to drive conservation and stewardship, and engage with academia to highlight the need for education and workforce development to provide this economy with a talent pipeline.

Maybe most important of all, these offices, address the intersection between spending time outside and improving public health. The galvanization of this movement even created an inspiring set of bi-partisan working principles nestled within the Confluence Accords, a broad spectrum of agreements to work across state lines for the good of all.

A new Interior could galvanize both the Confluence Accords and the place-based insight and energy of a new secretary, to ensure a thoughtful and well-connected national conversation about the future of our wild and heritage spaces, and the economies those spaces create and sustain.

We believe that Secretary Haaland could arrive in office with everything she needs to register in history as the leader who met this challenge. And we, with thousands of our energetic fellow Westerners, stand ready to help.

Patty Limerick is chair of the board for the Center of the American West. Luis Benitez is the former Director for the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. Alison Rose Jefferson is a historian and heritage conservation consultant.

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Limerick: How careful is too careful after I’ve had my second COVID-19 vaccine?

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Limerick: How careful is too careful after I’ve had my second COVID-19 vaccine? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/18/2021 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on March 18, 2021 By Patty Limerick

At 95% effective, I am ready to return to society but not to normal just yet

In days of yore, when someone told me to “be careful,” what I should do next was crystal-clear.

I should stop in my tracks before I stepped in front of the car that I had not seen coming. I should tighten my grip on the sharp knife I had been handling too casually. I should quit making disparaging remarks about the medical profession when one of my dining companions was a noted physician.

In March of 2021, the exhortation to “be careful” is about to lose its clarity.

After my second Pfizer shot takes hold, when someone tells me to “be careful,” I will be forced to respond, “I have no idea what you mean by that.”

For a full year, I have been the walking definition of carefulness and caution. I have resolutely kept my distance from sources of possible infection, even though this has meant shunning the company of the complex organisms that I had habitually designated as “my friends.” My only form of incorrigible risk-taking has been going to grocery stores, where the other shoppers and I have been equals in our reclusive, introverted, and antisocial behavior.

But soon, when I am fully vaccinated, “be very careful” will begin to evolve into “be a little less careful.”

What will that mean?

Even more unsettling is the recognition that a vaccinated person, even while suffering no symptoms herself, might still be capable of spreading the virus to others. So, if I were to make a merry return to restaurant-dining, my proximity could mean a steep decline in merriment for the people at tables near mine, in the days that followed. Now for the riddle that no expert can solve for me: of the innumerable changes that I have made in my conduct, and the countless restrictions that I have put on my activities, which of those changes and restrictions did the trick and protected me from infection? Unquestionably, a vaccine with 95% effectiveness offers a degree of liberation from worry and anxiety. And yet important questions set limits to that liberation. How long does the vaccine work? How will I know when the duration of its effectiveness begins to peter out?

Wouldn’t it be great if I could keep practicing the changes that kept me safe while loosening up on the constraints that never made much difference anyway?

And wouldn’t it be even greater if I could tell which was which?

For human beings, calibrating what it means to “be careful” is an enterprise in decision-making that we perform in a swirl of subjectivity, as fear and complacency, trust and suspicion, dread and confidence, compete for our allegiance.

If we can trust Mark Twain (and, a good share of the time, we can!), cats have a significant advantage over human beings when it comes to figuring out how to “be careful.”

“If a cat sits on a hot stove,” Twain said, “that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again. But that cat won’t sit on a cold stove either.”

The experienced cat knows that stoves can be trouble and therefore chooses not to venture into an experiment that could go badly.

For the short term, I am OK with the feline level of wisdom.

Sometime around mid-May, I plan to upgrade to the human.

Patty Limerick can be reached at pnl@centerwest.org, and you can find her blog, “Not My First Rodeo, at the Center of the American West website.

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Limerick: Henry Adams predicted one day we’d badly need “safeguards.” McConnell just rejected them.

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Limerick: Henry Adams predicted one day we’d badly need “safeguards.” McConnell just rejected them. Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 02/20/2021 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on February 20, 2021 By Patty Limerick

When the vote to convict former President Donald J. Trump fell short of a two-thirds majority, an impulse to escape the present — by leaping into the future — took possession of me.

Prediction #1: The seventeen Republicans — seven in the Senate and ten in the House — who voted to hold Trump responsible for inciting the Capitol takeover will live in peace with their consciences, even as they remain at odds with their political party.

Prediction #2: Facing a challenge he will share with many of his Republican colleagues, Sen. Mitch McConnell will struggle to renegotiate his relationship with his conscience and with his political party.

Here are the words Sen. McConnell spoke soon after he refused to convict Trump on the incitement of insurrection:

“There is no question, none, that Trump is practically and morally responsible,” McConnell declared, “for provoking the events” of Jan. 6. The assault on the Capitol arose from an “intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on his way out.”

How was it the same person could cast a vote that would absolve Trump, and then provide such a forthright statement of Trump’s guilt?

Was Sen.McConnell splitting the difference, or trying to have it both ways, or assuming that a devil’s bargain was his only choice? Was he convinced — to the core of his soul — that his highest service to his nation required him to find, in the Constitution, a prohibition on holding a president accountable after he had left office? Or was he simply seizing on a last-ditch compromise to keep his Republican party unified?

Given how many of us move through life leaving a trail of contradictions in our wake, we are hard put to claim the high ground of consistency that would permit us to reach a stern judgment of McConnell’s zigzagging course of action and expression.

But we do know this: Future presidents who behave reprehensibly in their last days in office will have reason to believe that the end of their term will also set them free of consequence and accountability in the eyes of the Senate.

If I could choose one quotation for the members of Congress to read to themselves and to quote to each other, this would be my choice: “Safeguards are often irksome but sometimes convenient, and if one needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly.”

Henry Adams, who wrote this sentence a century ago, knew something about the American presidency: He was the great-grandson of one president and the grandson of another president. Over the last four years, McConnell must surely have considered the recognition that Adams phrased so memorably: When we need safeguards, we are “apt to need them badly.”

And yet safeguards did not carry McConnell’s vote.

Members of Congress, when you are given the choice to serve your nation on the Safeguard Maintenance Team or the Safeguard Removal Team, please choose maintenance.

McConnell, should you reach a point where you feel ready to share your honest and searching reflections on the decisions you made in February of 2021, you have a standing invitation to deliver that speech at the University of Colorado.

Patty Limerick can be reached at pnl@centerwest.org, and you can find her blog, “Not My First Rodeo, at the Center of the American West website.

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Guest Commentary: How pure patriotism could oust nationalism

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Guest Commentary: How pure patriotism could oust nationalism Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/25/2021 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on January 25, 2021 By Patty Limerick and Bob Draughon

The nation’s leaders are now locked in a bitter struggle to control the vision of how the citizens of a divided nation should be brought back together. If all goes well in the next decades, the idea of a fight over the terms of unification may come to seem funny. Now, it is just frightening.

As an alternative to fear, we offer a different vision entirely: we ask our fellow citizens to consider joining us in a preference for patriotism over nationalism.

Patriotism, we believe, means supporting constitutional ideals, even when — especially when — supporting those ideals requires rethinking our own assumptions and political affiliations. A patriot’s allegiance is not to any governmental office, nor to the individual who fills it. A patriot’s convictions govern daily life, steadily aiming to make our nation a little better than it was the day before, whether through civil debate, legal action, carefully considered protest, or something as powerful as spreading grace to people in our proximity.

We discovered our agreement on the meaning of patriotism in a series of Zoom conversations that began last Fall. The dizzying difference between our ages has been a particularly valuable dimension of our discussions. One of us is 69; the other, 23. Given that intergenerational coalition-building has not universally been a strength of the babyboomers, we offer the reminder (using one among many examples) that Dr. Martin Luther King was 26 when he emerged as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement.

There are also striking differences between the life experiences that brought us to a shared set of beliefs. One co-author is a Special Operations combat veteran, currently, a freshman at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� headed to further public service in K-12 teaching. The other has worked as a professor at a public university for 36 years; she has also held federal office as a Member of the National Council on the Humanities. The student’s reflection on the way that his military service shaped his understanding of patriotism and nationalism refreshed and energized the professor’s thinking, convincing her that what she had heard from him should be heard by many.

Here are the features that we believe characterize patriotism in contrast to nationalism:

Patriots do not abandon critical appraisal, and in fact believe that honest criticism is the necessary first step to demanding better of their nation; nationalists are susceptible to thinking that criticism approaches — and crosses — the borders of disloyalty.
When they encounter people who hold differing convictions and principles, patriots commit to continuing to work collaboratively. Patriots refuse to throw in the towel; nationalists can feel fully justified in taking a “my way or the highway” stance.
Patriotism is dynamically inclusive; nationalism can be prey to intended and unintended exclusion on the basis of race and nationality.
Patriots embrace the ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and recognize that the nation has an undeniable record of failed promises — to Indian peoples, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, members of the white working class, and people of varying gender identities. And yet letting the failures define our nation discounts the complexity of American history and surrenders to a sense of inevitability and fatalism. Patriots see the failures as a challenge to do better; nationalists are inclined to dismiss the failures as exaggerated and dismissible grievances.

In the most memorable moments in our Zoom conversations, the student veteran reported a pattern: some of his fellow soldiers had shifted their attitudes from nationalism to patriotism. In fact, he had made that transition himself; when he entered military service, his opinions were closer to nationalism than they were when he left.

During his deployments, he took part in uncomfortable debates and discussions that went to bedrock: how consistently were American ideals of liberty and justice practiced within the United States and beyond its borders? Patriots, he felt more and more, faced up to hard questions like this one; nationalists were not even interested in them.

Reminding us that no people have ever changed their minds by being ridiculed, the co-author laid out an outline of the steps and stages in conversation that shifted his beliefs, and the beliefs of some of the people with whom he served, toward more patriotic values:

1.) Start with an open discussion of what qualifies an action as patriotic. Base this in examples of actions taken by national leaders that earned the agreement and the disagreement of the people with whom we are pursuing an understanding.

2.) Ask them what freedom means to them, and edge them toward the recognition that freedom is different for each person; the difference does not make the other person’s choice dismissible.

3.) Encourage our conversational partners to work just as passionately to support and defend freedoms they may disagree with, as the ones that they themselves value. Erosion of freedom is a slippery slope leading to authoritarianism; it can be only be a matter of time before the freedoms you hold dear land on the chopping block.

4.) Invite them to experiment with the daily practice of radical acceptance even towards those who do not yet join you in compassion, empathy, and tolerance.

We are fully aware that the definition of patriotism that we endorse is not prevailing in the nation today. We are also aware that many people who now use the term “patriot” to describe themselves follow customs of thought that make a better fit to the term “nationalist.”

We believe that individuals have the capacity to change their thinking. We believe that because we ourselves have changed our thinking.

Moreover, there is a good chance that our understanding of patriotism is shared by the majority of Americans, a hypothesis that the next months will put to a rigorous test.

Both of us have taken an oath of loyalty to our nation that will govern us throughout our lives. We took this oath voluntarily and wholeheartedly. Here are the words of the oath Bob Draughon took when he joined the United States Army, and Patty Limerick took when she joined the National Council on the Humanities.

I solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same . . .

We know that many Americans — including our elected national leaders — have also taken this oath. We urge them to start every day with thoughts about the patriotic commitment they have made. And we would be pleased if others wanted to take this oath in the privacy of their own homes, in a socially distanced gathering, or in Zoom exchanges like the ones that we have found so fruitful.

The acronym RINO is now stuck with the meaning ““Republicans in Name Only.” We look forward to a time when RINO can shift its meaning to “Republican Integrity Is Now Overwhelming,” while a counterpart acronym DINO will stand for “Democratic Integrity Is Now Overwhelming.” With patriotism in full operating mode, RINOs and DINOS can work together on a path that actually leads toward unification.

Contact Patty Limerick at pnl@centerwest.org, and find her blog, Not My First Rodeo, at the Center of the American West website, https://www.centerwest.org. Bob Draughon is a freshman at the University of Colorado Boulder pursuing degrees in history and economics. He was previously a mortarman in the 3d Ranger Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment and he deployed twice.

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Limerick: To save America we can’t just knock over the board game of life and go home

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Limerick: To save America we can’t just knock over the board game of life and go home Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/12/2020 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on November 12, 2020 By Patty Limerick

There are reasons to believe that the 2020 presidential election is tearing our nation in two. And there are also reasons to believe that Americans hold the power to refuse the rupture and to seek alternatives to anger and frustration.

When I contemplate the nation’s stalemate on winning and losing, my mind won’t stop circling back to a telling experience from my childhood.

As the youngest member of a family of enthusiastic board-game players, my first six or so years added up to an unbroken losing streak. Still, I persisted, picking up my cards, rolling the dice, and moving my token around the board . . . until, suddenly, I quit.

My impatience with losing suddenly surged past control, and I knocked the board over.

My parents and older sisters saw this as a teachable moment. “We will give you another chance,” they told me. “But if you do that again, we will not play with you.”

This was one of the luckiest moments of my life, equipping me to respond to flare-ups of vexation with a forceful note-to-self: “Stay in the game. Do not knock over the board.”

In our fractured nation in November of 2020, a variety of groups, sectors, and factions are experiencing anger and frustration as they confront limitations, flaws, and deficiencies in the traditions, processes, and customs of democratic self-governance.

I know that there are millions of Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump who now feel now aggrieved and enraged by the defeat of their candidate.

I know that there are millions of Americans who voted for Joseph R. Biden and now feel aggrieved and enraged by the refusal of the president and a good share of his followers to accept the results of the election.

I know that there are millions of Americans, who may or may not have voted, but who have given up faith and lost trust in the premises, provisions, institutions, and processes of a democratic republic.

Invoking a story from my childhood, I do not want to trivialize the distrust, frustration, and anger felt by my fellow citizens in the second week of November 2020. And yet, as I watch the tensions brought to a fever pitch by the president’s refusal to make a concession speech, by his most devoted followers’ certainty that the election was stolen, and by the mounting impatience of the president-elect’s supporters who want the transition to proceed without delay, the words, “Stay in the game; do not knock over the board,” stay locked in my mind.

Has the time come to follow the example set by my elders and simply tell the discontented to comply with the rules or leave the game?

That approach does not score high on either wisdom or practicality.

Here’s another possibility.

In every possible civic forum, we could meet with each other — and listen to each other — to identify the arenas where adjustments in the workings of our democratic republic should come up for rethinking. We could join together to imagine the changes that might promote greater trust in our institutions while stopping well short of knocking over the board.

You can contact Patty Limerick at pnl@centerwest.org, and you can find her blog, “Not My First Rodeo, at the Center of the American West website, https://www.centerwest.org.

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Limerick: Search for high moral values at University of Colorado leads to fraternity leader

Anonymous — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Limerick: Search for high moral values at University of Colorado leads to fraternity leader Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 09/19/2020 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on September 19, 2020 By Patty Limerick

In these grim times, we have every reason to conjure up ways to feel better about the world. So I asked myself, what could I do that would distract me from thinking obsessively about the variety of calamities unfolding in the nation?

Here’s what imagination delivered: to cheer myself up, I could go on a search for the most morally impressive young person at the University of Colorado. In truth, with the enormous talent pool in my vicinity, there are plenty of candidates who deserve this recognition.

But where would I begin my quest if I wanted a quick success?

Before 2020, I wouldn’t have thought to start at a CU fraternity.

But now I know.

Like many campuses nationwide, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� has been trying the experiment of bringing students to campus for in-person classes. For this experiment to work, restricting the spread of the coronavirus is essential.

This week started with a troubling message from Chancellor Phil DiStefano. CU is undergoing “a spike in COVID-19 cases,” he said, and everyone needs to pull together “to stop the recent rise in positive COVID-19 cases immediately.” Possibly making a contribution to this spike, several Boulder fraternities had held parties that defied public health orders, with large crowds, no masks, and little distancing.

When these fraternities were called out for their misbehavior, the most forceful reprimand came from 22-year-old Adam Wenzlaff, a business major with an emphasis on finance, a member of Sigma Nu, and the president of the Interfraternity Council.

Here are some statements Adam made in the letter he sent to the chapter presidents:

“I am disgusted with the lack of leadership that many of you have displayed.”
“The actions that have been displayed by a majority of our member chapters are completely indefensible.”
“The behavior of your fraternities over the last two weeks has been nothing short of outrageous.”
“You have failed your chapters and you have failed our community. WE MUST DO BETTER.”

I had the good fortune to get acquainted with Adam last winter. So when I learned of the stand he had taken, I instantly wrote a fan letter. When we talked on Zoom, reasons for admiration multiplied.

As those quotations from his letter surely demonstrate, Adam believes that “it is important to recognize actions that are not OK.” But he also believes that the people he reprimanded “did not want to hurt anyone.”

“You have to forgive people for failing to do their best,” he says, “just as you have to forgive yourself for your own shortcomings.”

In 2020, lots of people are driven to declare their dismay when they confront the bad conduct of others. Meanwhile, a smaller set of people feel compelled to offer compassion and understanding to the individuals whose behavior earned condemnation as “outrageous” and “completely indefensible.”

Adam Wenzlaff is one of the few people I know able to condemn and redeem simultaneously. Any day you’re not improving yourself,” he says, “is a day wasted.” Many other people voice high-minded principles. Adam lives them.
Adam is unusual, but he is not unique. He has a significant number of young counterparts whose gifts for leadership stand ready for unleashing and mobilizing on behalf of this troubled nation.

Let the unleashing and mobilizing begin.

Patty Limerick is chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.

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Patty Limerick: Clearing the air of respiratory protest

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Patty Limerick: Clearing the air of respiratory protest Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/14/2020 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on August 14, 2020

Once upon a time, people used to assemble in lecture halls and auditoriums to hear a speaker. They would sit unimaginably close to one another, exhaling with abandon into each other’s airspace. It was an odd feature of those times that hardly anyone wanted to sit in the front row, as if the speaker had a contagious disease that could travel only a few feet. That empty front row foreshadowed the future.

Usually, the speaker was someone who everyone liked or at least tolerated. But every now and then, the person at the podium was deeply disliked by some audience members. Since glaring provided insufficient satisfaction to these people, they felt morally obligated to shout to keep the speaker from being heard.

Of course, now we would be distraught about the droplets that flew through the air from this vocalized protest. But those were different days.

Back in those days, the custom of shouting to silence a speaker made me utterly miserable. Since I was rarely the target of the shouting myself, there was really no need for me to borrow trouble. But I had complicated my life with an affection for the First Amendment, a sentiment that I cannot shed.

And yet it never occurred to me that my affection for free speech required me to welcome every word that a speaker said. In fact, if I found a speaker’s words repellent, then it was even more important to refuse that person the joy she would have felt if permitted to go around, after her interrupted speech, complaining that she had been silenced.

So what could I do to ensure that speakers got heard?

If controversy seemed to be in the picture, I would make an opening announcement that the host organization, the Center of the American West, welcomed and encouraged the expression of dissent. But we asked people to respect our preference for “respiratory protest.”

In other words, people who did not like the speaker should protest by sighing with exasperation, snorting with contempt, gasping with disbelief, or — maybe most effective of all — yawning with pure, oratory-induced fatigue.

With respiratory protest, the dissenters could register their disapproval through the wondrously expressive power of inhalation and exhalation, and the speaker could still be heard. At the end of the talk, I could make the most of the available time by reading aloud the questions that people had written on index cards. When distrust and hostility saturated a question, to the best of my ability, I would convey these emotions when I read that question.

But in 2020, two developments knocked respiratory protest for a loop: Audiences no longer assemble in rooms to hear speakers and tragic events have undermined the humor that was essential to an audience’s acceptance of this eccentric practice.

In 2020, thousands of people have said “I can’t breathe” because the coronavirus has attacked their lungs. Meanwhile, a smaller but still significant number of people have said, “I can’t breathe” because another human being has applied pressure to their respiratory passages.

Respiratory protest seemed well-suited to the 2010s. But it has been relieved of its duties in 2020 and placed under a moratorium. For the open and civil forums we will need to create “a new normal,” I hope we’ll find something to take its place.

Patty Limerick is the faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.

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Limerick: Rectify the inherent failure of monuments

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Limerick: Rectify the inherent failure of monuments Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/13/2020 - 00:00

Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on July 13, 2020 By Patty Limerick

Recent limitations on access to hair stylists would not have troubled Medusa, the Greek Gorgon whose hair-do was actually a “snake-do.” Looking at Medusa was never a pleasure, but gazing in her direction could sometimes take a terrible turn.

If you looked directly into her eyes, she would turn you to stone.

In a mystifying trend that took off in the late nineteenth century, influential Americans took Medusa as their role model. All over the country, in a surge of enthusiasm for monuments and memorials, interesting people were turned into rigid and formulaic configurations of stone and metal.

Once those lifeless figures were fixed in place on pedestals, the dynamism of history had been permanently switched to the “off” position. This literal deadening of the people of the past defeated the monuments’ supposed purpose: to keep the memory of history alive. Even worse, conventional approaches to monument-making flattened history’s inherent complexity.

And so, over the decades, monuments revealed themselves to be useless and even counter-productive tools for crafting and popularizing a forthright reckoning with the past.

Every phase of the lifetime of monuments came with its own variation on failure. People creating monuments failed to consider the deeper historical context of the figures they celebrated. People who thought they were defending the monuments failed to give room for the full meaning of the individuals they thought they were championing. And people destroying monuments failed to think through what they were destroying.

We have a prime example of these failures close at hand.

On June 25, 2020, the Civil War Monument on the grounds of the Colorado state Capitol came under attack. The abrupt nosedive taken by the central figure in that monument, a Union soldier, encapsulates the reasons why the time has come to find a better way to ask citizens to remember the past.

During the Civil War, Union soldiers put a halt to the advance of Confederate troops into Colorado. And those Union soldiers also took part in brutal encounters with Arapaho and Cheyenne tribal peoples.

How is a monument to reckon with such a mixed legacy? Would it work to retain the half of the Union soldier who defeated the Confederacy, and amputate the half of the Union soldier who killed noncombatants at Sand Creek?

The one thing we know for sure is that the folks who knocked down the statue on June 25 were not inclined to pause to deliberate on that question.

When the monument was put in place in 1909, the original plaque included the “battle” of Sand Creek among the achievements of the Union Army. Fifty years earlier, in the 1860s, three formal governmental investigations had condemned the Sand Creek Massacre. In 1909, the creators of the Civil War Monument forgot, or never knew, about those commissions and their findings.

Like its counterparts nationwide, the Civil War Monument bears little relationship to the time period that it supposedly addresses. Any visitors and observers who thought they were contemplating the Civil War era were actually contemplating the values and preoccupations of the early 1900s.

Monuments and memorials with similarly problematic qualities are embedded in communities everywhere. Removing them would burden already overstretched civic budgets, while triggering endless, community-dividing disputes.

Here’s a more promising approach.

Let time, weather, and the physics of metal fatigue take over as the caretakers of the monuments.

But don’t stop there.

Unleash the amazing (and affordable!) talent pool of young folks who majored in history. Create a whole new corps of EMTs, with “EMT” reconfigured as Emergency Monument Technician. In truth, given the potential for violence in disputes over monuments, the new-style Emergency Monument Technicians will lessen the burden on the old-style Emergency Medical Technicians.

Trained to guide their fellow citizens through the process of weighing evidence and interpretation, these young people will leap into action when summoned to the sites of historical controversies. And when the controversies let up, the EMTs will shift over to conjuring up fresh and original ways to arrange structures and expressions — physical, digital, artistic, literary — that will invite historical reflection far more effectively than conventional monuments ever did.

So I dream of a future trip to the Colorado state Capitol grounds, a place of pilgrimage by people eager to see for themselves the world-famous, precedent-setting “Monument to Memorials”: a statue of Medusa, angry at the loss of her power to turn people into stone, but significantly improved in appearance by a visit to the herpetology stylist.

Patty Limerick is the faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.

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