By Rocky Mountain Voice Editorial Board
How Polis and the powers-that-be permitted the COVID-19 pandemic to pervert Colorado's pioneer spirit
It’s one of the more ubiquitous storytelling styles in legacy corporate media — anniversary time pegs. In editorial meetings, reporters and editors look at a calendar, see what historic newsy event(s) are upcoming that originally occurred 5, 10, 25 years ago, and put into proper historical perspective said event on the respective anniversary.
So, we thought here at Rocky Mountain Voice, with our exploding audience in the evolving media landscape, that we would do the same – bringing a historical spotlight on a topic that impacted all Coloradans, Americans – and just about every human on planet earth.
That topic? The government and media’s response to the COVID-19 virus.
As much as the powers-that-be across the Centennial State may want to rewrite the record books regarding how top-down mandates – and the hostile social peer pressure it manifested – mangled the lives of everyday taxpaying Coloradans five years ago, somebody should ensure the authoritarian impulses of the weeks and months in the wake of “15 days to slow the spread” aren’t lost to history.
Why now? This story isn’t over. And we mustn’t forget the fever pitch.
Five years ago, fear took the driver’s seat in Colorado. What followed was a series of decisions that reshaped daily life, faith and freedom.
With the help of state news outlets’ publicly available archives, let’s rewind five years to when Coloradans of all stripes began getting restless while isolated at home under the governmental edict to “social distance.”
Although Colorado’s elected officials, including the purported “libertarian” Gov. Jared Polis – and members of the media – act as if measures enacted during the pandemic were reasonable, that wasn’t the reality. By early April 2020, it became apparent freedoms enshrined in our federal and state constitutions were going to be under the thumb of government officials and business executives in bed with the state.
Meanwhile, the media blessed this magisterial moment through their propagandistic prism.
It was also five years ago this month it became apparent our most vulnerable population — children — were to be sacrificed at the altar of fearful, irrational and, frankly, selfish adults who put their own holistic health over that of kids.
The timeless foundational ethos of God-fearing America — that parents and adults sacrifice their well-being for the children — was inverted and perverted. Cowardice won in Colorado, and it was the children who were forced to courageously sacrifice.
Speaking of altars, Gov. Polis and other government officials mandated not only the closure, but non-scientific “distancing” and other paranoid practices in such hallowed locations as churches and synagogues.
This tore at the fabric of religious freedom and faith-based communities — the very institutions at the heart of the founding of this frontier state and courageous country.
Meanwhile, the governor and other powers-that-be kept liquor stores and pot shops open, pulling the curtain back on their lack of respect for constitutional and God-given liberties. And their cowardly disdain for the idea of letting citizens decide for themselves what elements of communal daily life, as humans have evolved to live it, are worth the risk or not.
The masquerading media mostly chewed it all up and spit it back out like the regurgitation artists they are. Directly and indirectly, they shamed any dissenting voices into Orwellian compliance, all while those ailing and/or dying in the hospital from COVID-19 or anything else weren’t permitted to have their loved ones with them. In far too many instances, that included the comfort of a pastor’s prayers, and the service of a priest administering last rites.
We believe it’s time to set the record straight. The COvid Chronicles will recount what Coloradans endured—not just the virus itself, but the fear-driven policies, the institutional betrayals and the cultural cost of forgetting who we are.
As American science fiction author Robert Heinlein warned, “A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.” At Rocky Mountain Voice, we choose to remember—so we can reclaim both.
Stay tuned for our debut installment of The COvid Chronicles. Let the reckoning – and reconciliation – of COVID’s history begin.