A Community at a Crossroads

By Hal Walter

As I write, Custer County School is under the watch of armed sheriff’s deputies. This follows the suicide of a 15-year-old boy last week – the second such tragedy in about a year’s time – and then a bizarre false rumor this week of a planned school shooting.

This rumor apparently had its basis in a drill for such a scenario conducted last week and was addressed in two robocalls from the school superintendent. I noticed when I dropped off my son Harrison at school this morning that only about half his classmates were lined up for the Pledge of Allegiance, and officials say overall attendance was only 50-55 percent.

Such is the world we now live in, here in our quiet community in the shadow of some of the most magnificent mountains in the country. And there does seem to be a shadow beyond that thrown by the high peaks at sundown.

This past winter, the divisiveness that has been building for nearly two years reached a new crescendo when the Custer County commissioners decided to pull the county’s legal advertising from the community newspaper, the Wet Mountain Tribune, and award them instead to the Sangre Sentinel.

The Tribune has been the community’s newspaper of record for 130 years. It’s a typical small-town weekly newspaper, with mainly local news and photos, and a clearly marked opinion section. The owner, Jim Little, is a longtime friend, and I think he does a good job of keeping his opinion on the opinion pages.

The Sentinel, on the other hand, bills itself as a “conservative newspaper.” A sign hanging on the front of the office says so. Its contents include local news offerings interspersed with articles about national topics such as the “Hollywood Jihad” against American Sniper, and how the government plans to take your guns away.

The Sentinel made its appearance about the same time the issue of marching with guns in the annual July 4th Parade became a major brouhaha two summers ago. The paper clearly angles its content toward a certain political ideology. However, it managed to underbid the Tribune for the county’s legals, thus giving the commissioners a financial excuse for the decision.

My opinion on this is that the commissioners made a choice to spend taxpayer money to support a political cause, and this is just plain wrong. Politics aside, the decision simply is not in the best interests of the county or taxpayers. The purpose of legal notices is to get information out to the general public. With a larger base and more local news, more people simply have a better chance of seeing legal notices in the Tribune. 

In recent months I have had friends from out of town tell me they no longer visit the Westcliffe area because their perception of the community is that we are a bunch of lunatic-fringe gun nuts, a false notion that has been at least partially shaped by the Sentinel. I also know two families who are making plans to move away because they can no longer deal with this element of the community.

[InContentAdTwo]These are visitors who no longer spend their leisure money here, and these are residents who will no longer “buy local” after they move. In addition, these two families that are moving also have kids in the school, and that loss will cut into education funding. In a small community like this, the snowball effect is huge.

These are just people I know. Surely there are others.

Which brings us to a larger question: If you own a local business, why would you advertise in the Sentinel? Why would you support an element that scares people away from the community, and that makes good people want to move away? If this keeps up, the only legal notices left to print will be the delinquent tax roll.

Custer County is a great place to live and has a lot to offer for a wide variety of people regardless of political and religious beliefs. We have some really cool things going on here, including being selected as the finish for Ride the Rockies this summer. However, the perception of our community seems to have been hijacked by a loud and fringe minority emboldened by its own “newspaper of record.”

Amid all this, many of us wonder why two young boys have taken their own lives. I don’t know the answer to this very sad and emotional topic. For me this issue brings up more questions than it does answers. It’s easy to blame the ready access to guns, but there has to be something much deeper that makes a person – especially a young person – actually reach for one. Could it have something to do with one’s environment and socio-political surroundings? A sense of hopelessness?

One just has to take a look around at the empty storefronts, the multitude of For Sale signs, and the number of homes on the market – there are hundreds of them – to get a feel for the economic situation here. If you’re a kid growing up in this environment, it may be difficult to see a future here … or a way out.

Once again, I don’t know the answers. But one thing I do know is the Custer County community has reached a very serious crossroads. We need to ask ourselves what we really believe in and what our real values are. What kind of community do we want to build? How will people who live here make money to support their families? Will we be insular or inclusive? We need to know why kids are taking their own lives. We need to know why we needed armed guards at the school on this day, and why so many parents chose fear over fact and logic. We need to ask people why they are leaving. We need to ask ourselves why we choose to live here.

If I ran a newspaper in this community, I’d forget about the legal ads for now and start digging at these serious questions. And if we want some honest answers, maybe we should start by asking the kids.

Hal Walter is a 30-year resident of Custer County, and the author of “Full Tilt Boogie – A journey into autism, fatherhood, and an epic test of man and beast.”
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