It won’t do any good to get angry with Douglas County political leaders for acting out on their swamp of conspiracy theories, paranoia, ignorance and exasperating weirdness.
Sure, anger is the first response sensible Douglas County residents and just about everyone else attached at the border to our odd neighbors to the south. Douglas County commissioners got an earful from residents this week. Sober county residents wanted to know what in the hell county leaders were thinking when they announced, after a tantrum, the county would abandon a 50-year-old health-department cooperative among two other counties because of an optional pandemic mask mandate.
Tri-County Health Department, after months of agonizing over the decision, finally agreed last week to require face masks in public places — unless local town or county officials opted out of the requirement.
It was the legislative equivalent of “pretty please,” after every single medical official and scientist — that normal people would trust — agreed that if everyone wears masks in public, there will be substantially fewer COVID-19 infections.
In fact, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said this week that if everyone in the nation were to wear a mask in public and practice social distancing, the virus would come under control.
The mask requirement is so exasperating that it even has Gov. Jared Polis calling scofflaws “selfish bastards.” Mask misfits have made Polis raise his clenched fist, sort of, when he says that “there ought to be a law to make people wear the damn mask,” even though he refuses to be the one to make that law.
Douglas County types don’t want a law because they think it undermines our inalienable right to, well, to not wear one.
Right.
It isn’t like this should come as a surprise. This is the community that made international news on Mother’s Day when a restaurant in Castle Rock defied state indoor restaurant bans. That was back when infections were raging and the state had no idea just how fast the virus would burn through Front Range communities. The restaurant gave the finger to the rest of Colorado and the ban. Instead, they served up a crowd and a hornets’ nest of controversy. County and state health officials shut them down, making for great Douglas County don’t-tread-on-me-or-my-pancake-parlor theatrics.
County leader types down there have long blazed their own path through a make-believe world of weirdness.
Frequently at the front of the cavalcade of comedy down there is state Rep. Patrick Neville. Just a couple of choice moves by the House Minority Leader, no kidding, gives you a sense of what’s up with him. When Colorado started closing restaurants and businesses along with other states as the pandemic crisis grew quickly, Neville called actions by Polis and health officials, a “Gestapo-like mentality.”
After taking part in celebrating the Castle Rock Coffee and Creme’s Mother’s Day charade and posting pictures to social media, he lamented this about his detractors. “The left mob is coming after me over this hardcore. I have to take a step back and think, ‘they are this crazy angry because I went to a coffee shop?’”
None of this is new.
This is a county that for decades has lived and breathed denial over their ill-fated water problem. For years, officials have flagrantly let developers and people build any damned thing, any damned place they wanted, including Highlands Ranch, even though practically the entire 350,000-person county drinks from a dying aquifer.
Water is hardly their only wackiness. Almost everyone in the Douglas County Republican Party foams at the mouth when you start talking gun safety laws.
Not the sheriff, however. The courageous and astonishingly persistent Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock, an all-out fellow Republican, was a leading proponent of the state’s red-flag law last year. That’s the law that allows police to confiscate weapons from people with severe mental problems before they kill themselves or someone else. The concept is only weird for people who appreciate guns over anyone’s life, even their own. It’s not weird for Spurlock, who had one of his deputies slain by a mentally ill guy with a gun.
Spurlock fell behind the Red Flag bill, along with most police chief and police union types because, among other things, it makes perfect sense. When he did, he was clobbered with withering criticism from county area officials. He was ostracized by the same cowardly Republican Douglas County commissioners who had the gall to stand behind him at a press conference earlier, just after the horrific Highlands Ranch STEM school shooting.
I know. It’s hard to keep up. So much so, that most people and media just dismiss their antics like you would your elderly uncle’s rant at Thanksgiving Dinner about how the small printing on the back of cereal boxes is actually a conspiracy between food manufacturers and optometrists, who just want to sell you glasses so you can read the small print. It’s only mildly amusing until he starts pounding on the table.
Douglas County Republican antics became no longer amusing just this week. The county GOP leaders were forced to sort of apologize for an altered cartoon they created and published on their Facebook page. The cartoon depicted the boot of Polis holding a pandemic mask on someone who was trying to say, “We can’t breathe.” It infuriated everyone in the region who has even moderate appreciation for the Black Lives Matter movement. That movement was recently energized by reaction to the murder of George Floyd and his last words, “I Can’t Breathe.” If you want to see for yourself just how far from the norm the DougCO GOP is from you and those you know, check out their Facebook page.
Appreciating reality is not these Republican leader’s strong suit. It’s unclear what their strengths are, other than being able to keep winning elections.
So it came as no surprise that Douglas County commissioners want to divorce themselves from a health department that has become synonymous with being credible and thoughtful.
We’re all going to be sorry if they carry through with their threat. Residents in Adams and Arapahoe counties, like Douglas, save real money by combining services Tri-County health provides, mandated by the state.
It just has to be OK that they flaunt proven mask wisdom down there. Like most people, Douglas County residents work, shop and play in the Aurora and Denver areas. They have to play by our rules here, and wear a mask or stay in the car.
What’s unforgivable is that they are forcing Douglas County grocery store workers, restaurant employees and bank tellers, people who work for a living, to risk their health and lives so that local politicians can make their dull point.
Douglas County leaders are a burden the rest of us have to bear and mitigate for our own good and the good of people they afflict. While the world hopes for an effective vaccine to end the pandemic, we can only hope for an effective election to end what’s ailing Douglas County.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com