Denver City Streets, Home, and Rick Steves

You might expect a post like this from someone who's favorite television show is Rick Steves' Europe on PBS. Because for all the site-seeing that Steves does, he often highlights the simple act of embedding himself in the culture. He shows off good walks. He visits friends and has dinner with them.

He doesn't just highlight what you need to visit and check off a list, he makes himself one of the locals by doing things a local would do and hanging with people a local would. He's a a tourist who's made Europe home. He walks the streets no other tourist does, and that's what helps him really feel like the fantastic, the foreign, and the wonderful can become a part of who he is, and not merely just what he does.

I remember that same feeling the one and only time I was in London. There were lots of amazing things to see: Kew Gardens, the Tower of London, the Globe Theater, Buckingham and Kensington Palaces, the made-up residence of Sherlock Holmes, the British Library, and the list goes on. But after a few days of doing that, I just wanted to walk around. I wanted to walk the streets no one else did. I wanted to sit in St. James park and read Dickens (and I did). I simply wanted to take in the city as if I were a Londoner.

I was ruminating upon this simple idea this past Friday. Fridays are my day off, and I share some babysitting duties with a friend in order to have a few hours to myself. In those hours, I like to walk or jog around various Denver neighborhoods, and this Friday I was jogging around Cheesman Park and Congress Park. Besides the fact that I was jogging in a neighborhood with houses I'll never be able  to afford, I still felt home. You see, this is one of my habits. I regularly go strolling through random Denver neighborhoods, and I've done this with many of Denver neighborhoods in my 5 years of living here. "Downtown" isn't merely a cool place to visit or have a nice apartment. Downtown is mine.

That's because I have this crazy idea that you can't really call a city home until you walk the streets regularly. It's not home until you know the house on every city block that people normally bypass since it's not an easy way in or out of the city. It's not home until you've walked the untrendy places (Curtis Park) as well as the trendy ones (Wash Park). It's not home until you've had an ordinary meal in an ordinary- as opposed to chic- restaurant that isn't visited by anyone else except the patrons in the neighborhood.

And even still, Denver isn't home. I'm only going on living here my 6th year, which is a common phenomenon in Denver. It's a popular place to move to, but not a common place to be from. Yet when I go home to Tennessee, that doesn't feel completely like home anymore either. Anyone else who returns "home" for the holidays and then goes back to where they currently live understands what I'm talking about.

This idea of place, of belonging, and of not even knowing how to belong causes a great disruption in the existential peace we need in American culture. Most don't walk city streets regularly just for fun. And not even that would be enough to overcome the need we feel to be home.

Chesterton noted in his famed book Orthodoxy that we have to love this world so much to call it ours but hate it so much in order to change it. It's got to be the place we go home to at night and at the same time the place we wage war. Perhaps it's the war part that gives us so much angst. We move based on jobs or we lose jobs and can't live where we'd prefer. We're never completely home, even when we are geographically.

There's a longing, as C.S. Lewis articulated, that no reality of home can ever really truly satisfy. To Lewis, and to me, that must mean we were meant for another world.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Snow

To my faithful reader, I'm back from my self-imposed exile. For what seems like two months now, I haven't had much inspiration to write or blog. Plenty of things have gone on in the world that are newsworthy (Egypt among them), but I haven't felt that I had a unique take on any of it. But I'm back, and it's something a little unusual.

Plenty of seemingly great things happen in this world that have unfortunate consequences. It's these unfortunate consequences that often get ignored, and I hope to bring one particular one to light today. But before I do so, allow me to illustrate what I mean through two economic examples.

All across the country, downtown areas are getting revitalized. What once were urban ghettos are now becoming great places to live and shop again. This process is often called "gentrification" because the gentry (upper and upper-middle class) move back in to once-great but now-distressed areas. The illusion of gentrification is that poverty actually ceases and things improve. The unintended consequence, though, is that gentrification is really bad for renters, so poverty just moves and isn't eradicated. But gentrification is good for owners, though, and those people get wealthier. How many poor people you know are owners? Good=revitalized old things. Unintended consequence=poverty moves to the suburbs.

The most classic example of the economic unintended consequence is the minimum wage. Coming from the progressive political camp, the logic is that people will be better helped out of poverty if the government forces businesses to pay people more (this logic is more true with what is called the "living wage"). Yet, the unintended consequence of minimum wage laws is that if you force employers to pay their employees a certain wage (without mandating how many employees each individual company must have), then employers will just employ less people. Though raising the minimum wage is a perpetual Democratic issue, notice how nobody is talking about it in an era of high unemployment? That's because everybody knows the unintended consequence.

And that leads me to the last unintended consequence I wish to discuss: snow, and it's resulting removal. In Denver, it snows a lot. And that snow must go somewhere else besides roads. In order to make sure the economy hums, those roads must be clear in order to get workers to where they need to go. I am one of those commuters. One of the things- and it's taken me 5 winters to see this- I'm starting to see is that that snow, when plowed, gets pushed to the side of the roads. Where are the sidewalks? On the side of the roads. Where are the bus stops? On the side of the roads. Who are the people who use sidewalks and bus stops in the suburbs? Usually the lower class. How does snow removal thus affect the lower classes? Disadvantageously.The good=snow removal from the roads. The bad=making it almost impossible for poor people to travel for days on end without being severly hampered.

And I'm not sure what to do about it, and that frustrates me. I wish, on the very same days we have snow plows on the roads, that we'd have snow plows on the sidewalks. Other than that, I'm stumped.

Any of you have ideas?

Aliens in Denver

If you started reading this post thinking you were going to read about immigration, you'd be wrong. This post is about actual aliens, and what the government should or shouldn't do about it. You see, some people say the government doesn't do enough. To those people, I give you this initiated ordinance on the ballot in the City and County of Denver this November:

An initiated Ordinance in the City and County of Denver requiring the creation of an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission to help ensure the health, safety, and cultural awareness of Denver residents and visitors in relation to potential encounters or interaction with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or their vehicles and fund such commission from grants, gifts and donations.

You didn't read that incorrectly. I'm actually voting for the approval/rejection of an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver that might possibly be supported from certain "grants" (read: potential taxpayer money). (Also, if you want to go to the proponents website, have a laugh here.) I'd love to go on a long diatribe on the idiocy of this ballot initiative but I'm hoping it's apparent to the reading audience.

This ballot initiative calls to mind the essential questions that people should still ask themselves regarding the role of government. With respect to anything that government should do, we ought to ask: "Should the government do this at all?" and "If so, what level of government should do it?"

For those wanting the government involved in health decisions, ask yourself, "can the government actually be an instrument of compassion?" For those wanting government involved in the affairs of retirement, ask yourself, "Is the government, by its nature, good at handling money?" And for those wanting government involvement in extraterrestrial life, ask yourself, "what on earth does it matter?" 

A classic liberal position (read: conservative economically) understands that the government can only be an instrument of coercion. This isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's a necessary thing in it's sphere. The government wages war (global) and assures justice (police) and collects taxes to do so. But it probably shouldn't do much else.

The careful biblical reader will also note that the Bible acknowledges the role of the government in its necessary roles of coercion (taxes and war). The Bible does not acknowledge much else, and is actually skeptical of any government intervention in economics (big government is the Beast of Revelation in chapters 13, 17-18). The government cannot be an instrument of compassion or banking or savings. And it should not be an instrument to propagate weird fringe groups.