At some point in recent history, fire and weather officials had sense enough to identify and warn the public about extreme hazards by issuing Red Flag Warnings.
We should spread that good-sense program across the state, and the nation.
For years — and years — the state’s burial and funeral industry has had red flags popping up out of the ashes, from stolen body parts and between stacks of rotting remains.
For most of us, it’s unfathomable that the Penrose couple operating the Return to Nature Funeral Home were able to accumulate almost 200 rotting corpses that were supposed to have been cremated or disposed of in some way other than piling them up.
In most municipalities, city code inspectors regularly write up tickets for sloppy trash cans. Piles of dead people?
You can only have a few cats and dogs in most places, but there’s no limit on corpses.
If you park your car in front of your Denver home on street-sweeping day, it’s a $75 ticket. But a Denver mortician can park a hearse with a cadaver inside his garage for over a year and nobody cares.
Now, it seems equally unfathomable that state employees, lawmakers and even leaders in the burial industry are suddenly clamoring for regulation.
“The current legislative and regulatory framework has failed individuals in Colorado,” Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies Executive Director Patty Salazar said during a recent legislative hearing, according to an Associated Press story.
State proposals would not only create regulations, such as regular inspections, but another proposal would require more qualifications and requirements for burial and funeral home operators.
Joe Walsh, president of the Colorado Funeral Directors Association, told state lawmakers the industry is broadly behind both proposals, the AP reported.
“Our industry, we are taking a beating. Going back to 2018 there have been four incidents, they have been grievous,” Walsh said. “We need to definitely react to this, and we need to make sure everything is being done to not make that happen again.”
No doubt.
The lesson learned? Red flag-warnings are best not ignored.
That’s a lesson not yet learned in Alabama.
This is a state that should refrain from lawmaking and appointing judges altogether.
More than a century ago, Alabama state legislators passed a law making it illegal to shoot guns at mosquitoes.
Yeah, really.
Apparently, there was an ammunition shortage, and the law was intended to help the public conserve bullets and shells.
No doubt you see the multiple red flags here. Ammunition shortage? What else were they shooting at?
Decades later the legislature there outlawed fishing with dynamite.
It’s true.
So it was less than surprising last week when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that human sperm and eggs in a fertility lab should be bestowed with all the rights of people. The state’s chief justice quoted scripture, not science, in his ruling.
At what point will the rest of the nation be ashamed for ignoring so many red flags in Alabama and just laughing it off?
I think we’re there.
Finally, we can all agree that the red flags around what’s left of the Colorado Republican Party are flapping hard. Not only that, but the dash lights have all gone on, and that squealing alarm you hear coming from Colorado Springs means the dumpster fire there is out of control.
If you’re like most of us, you look the other way when you see news about the Colorado GOP, which has very little to do with actual Colorado Republicans. You might wince or laugh at stories about state Republican leadership, officially, supporting indicted election fraud suspect Tina Peters. Just a few weeks ago, old-school Republicans like Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman joined others like him and told top GOP brass to knock it off with the Peters things.
You probably cringe over news about the state Party machine, endorsed criminally indicted and civilly convicted Donald Trump. Yes, the same Trump that this weekend said his cred with Black voters increased because of his arrests and mugshot.
And during the past few weeks, news about GOP Party top dog and employee Dave Williams spending state party money on pushing his own campaign for congress to represent Colorado Springs — alongside challenger Douglas Bruce — has got those red flags smoking hot and turning to ash.
No need to be coy. Alabama, the state’s corpse industry and the remnants of the Colorado Republican Party need hyper-vigilance and immediate intervention.
Catastrophes can and do happen by spurning red-flag warnings. If you need further proof, google “Lauren Boebert.”
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
Bravo !! I do not know how you kept yourself to a short opinion. Probably didn’t have time for the novel.
Seems hard to do, putting a thread of words through the Alabama Supreme Court, sperm and eggs, funerals, corpse, dead people ashes, Colorado Republicans and Lauren Boebert. But you did it, Dave, and with red thread. Now if my college educated brain could only get what you were driving at, if anything.