By Martha Quillen
After Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain committed suicide, news sources focused on our nation’s escalating suicide rate, and some concluded our entire society is sick. But that’s hardly a novel idea in our era of school shootings, factionalism, and increased levels of opioid addiction, obesity, suicide, inequality and scandals that reveal sexist and racist attitudes.
By Martha Quillen
If you look at the big picture, the United States is doing very well. Per capita income is up, and murder rates, war deaths, and unemployment are down. But Americans are increasingly unhappy. The World Happiness Report (an independent project published annually by the U.N.) indicates the U.S. dropped from 14th place in 2017 to 18th in 2018.
By Martha Quillen
Mention America’s Great Divide today and most people will think of the partisan divisions growing between Trump supporters and critics, blacks and whites, men and women, and other political rivals. But when I first moved to Colorado the most talked-about Great Divide was the geographic barrier that divided rivers flowing east from rivers flowing west.
By Martha Quillen
For years now, the media and Pew Research reports have indicated Americans are growing increasingly partisan, which is generally characterized as a bad thing, and has been credited with spurring extremism, gridlock, Congressional ineffectiveness and politically motivated violence. But what shocks me in recent years is not the national news; it’s how much vitriol is making its way into our local newspaper.
By Martha Quillen
‘Tis the season to look back at the past year and make resolutions for the next, but given the amount of violence and political discord in 2017, what sort of resolution is apropos? We could all promise to exercise, eat better, work harder and get more organized, and if we actually accomplish those things, it will be wonderful, not to mention astounding. But given the animosity that’s tearing our country into partisan pieces, is self-improvement enough? Or are we in need of far greater reforms?
By Martha Quillen
By October, I found myself thoroughly bewildered by conflicting viewpoints about Salida’s attorney, Ben Kahn. To hear local activists tell it, he is either terrific or incompetent, which put me in a wait and see mode. But then a candidate told me he thought getting rid of Kahn was an important objective, and I thought in that case I’d better re-evaluate some things before I vote.
By Martha Quillen
Everything I ever really needed to know I could have learned from my dog. But for some reason I didn’t realize how smart he was until after he was gone. Bodie died last month (with a jolt of assistance from the vet). He’d started getting sick about three months earlier, and the vet prescribed an antibiotic.
What Do Affordable Housing, Equality, and World Peace Have In Common? By Martha Quillen A story in the July 6 Mountain Mail made me laugh – until I realized it wasn’t a joke. The article was about how Jackson, Wyoming, planned to address “its worker housing shortage” by establishing a parking lot where workers could sleep …
By Martha Quillen
If anybody tries to tell you that the United States of America is no longer the greatest manufacturing nation of all time, you should remind them that this is the Information Age, and due to the Internet, information has gone viral and is out of control. Now, people are calling this a “post-truth” era, because there are so many conflicting stats, facts and figures being produced. And clearly the United States contributes plenty to those developments.
By Martha Quillen
In recent decades, political machinations have gotten so combative that a second civil war seems more likely than having Congress develop a decent, mutually acceptable plan for health care, immigration, or anything else. Talk about a house divided… America’s fighting spirit is aroused and stirring.
By Martha Quillen
Do nice guys finish first? Or last?
That’s a classic question, but what I want to know is not where nice guys finish (since they likely finish in different places), but what merits the designation “nice.” In our era, citizens tend to either praise political VIPs or call them stupid – and sometimes even accuse them of criminal activities – whether the conversation is about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, or the mayor of Salida.
By Martha Quillen
I’m in the midst of an enormous overhaul, emptying closets, file cabinets, book cases and drawers, combing through years of detritus, and getting ready to revamp my life. Where am I going? What am I going to do? I don’t have time to contemplate that. I have forty years of mementos to sort and a shed to clean. And I need to get it done ASAP.
By Martha Quillen
Trump’s mean-spirited but wildly popular insults have come as a bit of a shock to America and the world. But it’s hard to imagine a really nice guy becoming president. The idea of a peaceful, benevolent leader seems antithetical to American enterprise. Smiling George W. gleefully pitched us into war, and coolly polite Obama launched deadly drones. Even devout Christians question the possibility of peace and forgiveness. It didn’t work in Afghanistan or Iraq, so forget it.
By Martha Quillen
What a coincidence; the theme of this month’s magazine is music, and I’d been planning on writing about harmony for more than a year now. Of course, I hadn’t planned on writing about our local music scene, because I don’t know anything about it.
But I’d been reading about some of the ways various economists, psychologists, historians and journalists think we can address our political problems without undue discord. And I’d intended to share some of their ideas once the election was over. At this point, it seems as if the hubbub over the 2016 election may never subside.
This is clearly not a good time for harmonizing. In recent years, our world has been transformed by a seemingly limitless flow of information which provides enough material for people to compose whatever reality they want, and Americans clearly aren’t choosing the same one.
In previous Centrals, I devoted considerable space to fretting about people’s increasing tendency to embrace highly partisan, diametrically opposed views regarding news, issues, facts and even truth itself. A lot of critics blame social media for that trend, because users tend to form like-minded communities, but I’m not so sure about that.
I figure journalists, networks and websites are just as responsible, since they often rely on gossip, sensationalism and controversy to build their audience. And political campaigners certainly play a role, because they tend to get derailed by financing, and who’s with them and who’s not, and what’s wrong with their opponents.
And the tendency of public officials to focus on their own agenda – rather than on workable solutions for the voters – encourages gridlock, stasis, lies, corruption and anger.
So is our process oriented toward picking leaders? Or fights?
By Martha Quillen
According to those in the know, America has lost it. But what have we lost? Donald Trump says it’s our greatness, because the way he sees it, our nation isn’t feared nor revered anymore, whereas others claim we’ve lost our mojo, which generally refers to our gumption and can-do attitude. Many agree we’ve lost our minds, and others think we’ve lost our soul. And scads of commentators believe America has lost either its moral compass, or moral standing, or morals altogether.
By Martha Quillen Years ago, Art Linkletter, an old variety show host, asked young school children to recite the first line of the Pledge of Allegiance and explain what it meant, and several of the kids called it “one country invisible,” and one thought he was pledging “a legion” of soldiers to protect the flag. …
In a column posted on Wired.com, Issie Lapowsky called Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “one of the most skilled politicians of our times.” That observation came after conservatives accused Facebook staffers of suppressing conservative content in its Trending Topics feature. In response, Zuckerberg invited more than a dozen prominent conservatives to a meeting in the Silicon Valley, and the attendees (who included Glenn Beck of talk radio fame and Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party) came away satisfied and appreciative.
By Martha Quillen
I’ve always thought of Salida as a sweet, old-fashioned sort of place with picturesque houses, tree-lined streets and a bandstand in the park. To me it seems a lot like River City, the fictionalized Iowa town in The Music Man.
Donald Trump claims he can “make America great again,” but when did it stop being great? The United States is the richest, mightiest nation on earth. It has the highest GDP and most powerful military. Yet the 2016 presidential races are exposing a dark, depressing aspect of American supremacy.
By Martha Quillen
It’s hard to know whether the most serious problem facing our world today is rising temperatures or rising tempers, but perhaps they’re related. Maybe tempers are rising because modern life confronts people with so much that seems out of their control, such as climate change, war, terrorism, escalating costs and changing technology.
by Martha Quillen I used to hate the idea of mixing politics and religion. I assumed politics were about public issues: schools, roads, disaster relief, regulatory agencies, courts, prisons, trade agreements…. And religion was about personal matters: What do I believe? What’s right? Wrong? Good? Or evil? Why am I here? What is my purpose? …
by Martha Quillen Two score and six years ago, Ed Quillen and some of his friends started musing about whether Wyoming could be taken over by hippies (in a nonviolent manner, of course). It was a crazy idea, but the events unfolding in 1969 almost made it seem feasible. Student riots, sit-ins, and demonstrations rocked …
by Martha Quillen Getting citizens, parties and government officials to communicate, cooperate and work together is nigh impossible these days. But despite several decades of growing dysfunction, I thought we would eventually work things out, until I read Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hateful Acts …
by Martha Quillen The transfer of wealth from America’s middle classes to those who already have the most continues – with very little resistance. “Why Workers Won’t Unite,” an article by Kim Phillips-Fein in The Atlantic this April, explores why laborers haven’t come together to reverse this ominous trend – and also why old-fashioned economic …
by Martha Quillen Americans Are Still Strong, Courageous and Bold, But Courage May Be Overrated Are Americans driven by unfounded fear and anxiety? According to an article in the March issue of The Atlantic, our fears regarding crime and terrorism are way out of touch with reality. With backup from numerous experts and studies, Jonathan …
by Martha Quillen I’m really concerned about American politics. Our public discourse has been divisive and immoderate for decades, but the citizenry never seemed as burned out, fed up and over it as some of my friends and acquaintances do now. People tell me that our political process is broken and bankrupt, that it’s been …
by Martha Quillen In The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo illustrates how ordinary people can be incited into acts of almost unimaginable violence. “The process begins,” he warns, “with creating stereotyped conceptions of the other, dehumanized perception of the other, the other as worthless, the other as all-powerful, …
by Martha Quillen Republicans and Democrats seldom agree on anything, and Congress is determinedly divisive. But what about us? Do we still agree on America’s founding principles? Do we still believe in the proposition that all men are created equal? And that people have certain inalienable rights, among them Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of …
by Martha Quillen Whom do you trust? I don’t trust people because they’re reputed to be experts. Or because they write books, or say they’re Christians or enlightened or accredited. And I don’t trust FOX news commentators, MSNBC personalities, corporate spokesmen, President Obama or Salida city council members and administrators to tell me the whole …
By Ed Quillen
The exact date cannot be determined now, but it was about twenty years ago, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, that the Salida Improvement Commission began its important work of getting a better class of people in town.
“We have entirely too many poor people in town,” one member stated at the star of the meeting. “As long as they’re around, they’ll depress property values and otherwise delay our progress into become a world-class four-season destination center.”
with Martha Quillen
Conservative pundits and politicians have long rallied their followers by fomenting fury, but you’ve got to wonder if they’re going too far when they start fomenting revolution.
Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann often urges revolution, presumably in the metaphorical sense. In March she said, “I want the people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back.”
Ever since the 2000 presidential election, it’s been fashionable to divide America into “Red States” and “Blue States.” That’s because the major television networks used maps that showed George W. Bush states in red and Al Gore states in blue.
Do You Know What You Don’t Know?
Remember that old saw: “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story”? It’s funny, but ignores a basic truth: What constitutes fact isn’t always clear. As June segued into July, everything I read seemed to demonstrate the same theme: Facts are often just the fictions that most of us agree upon.
There was a time when I felt close to the leading edge of digital technology. That was a quarter of a century ago, in 1984, when I was one of the first Salidans to work with a genuine personal computer.
The computer was an Osborne I. It had two 5.25-inch floppy drives, a tiny 5-inch screen, an 8-bit Z80 CPU, and a full 64-kilobytes of RAM.
Quillen’s Corner
by Martha Quillen
Language is a gift, extraordinary and wondrous, but unrestrained speech can be more aggravating than yowling cats. In fact, I suspect that if dogs and cats could talk, we would not regard them as nearly so adorable.
At first glance, it might be hard to say which is the bigger controversy hereabouts: Christo’s plan to drape the Arkansas River, or Nestlé’s plan to haul water to a plant in Denver to be bottled and sold as Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.
Personal finance has never been my forte. Nor Ed’s. In fact, when we moved some savings around to pay taxes and make IRA contributions this January, a bank officer suggested a different kind of account and Ed said, “Ask Martha. She’s the one who keeps track of that stuff.”
That was news to me.
Although I have been pulled over a few times in the past dozen years, no traffic tickets have resulted from these meetings with the constabulary. Thus I have been able to renew my driver’s license by mail, without the hassle of taking the test to determine whether I still know the rules of the road.