Denver school board hit with race-based redistricting lawsuit

If you’ve been reading my columns, you’ve noticed I’m basically illiterate. I blame my dyslexia and public education, but my Olympic-level laziness could be the driving factor.

Anyway, I basically can’t read (and, still, I graduated from CU Boulder, so another endorsement of public higher education).

So, for me to recommend a book is like a nun recommending sexy lingerie. How can you take it seriously? But how can it not get you thinking?

As we celebrate Colorado’s 150th birthday, may I strongly suggest you read, or re-read, James Michener’s classic novel “Centennial,” which arguably presents one of the most accurate portraits of the Colorado character.

A Colorado story

I understand this is a sizable ask. The book is massive. Now that phonebooks are extinct, parents put “Centennial” on chairs for their little kids to reach the table.

I listen to books on tape. So, when I saw this book took 50 hours, I almost went back to my comic book (which we now call “graphic novels,” like that is somehow going to impress women).

It’s not that “Centennial” gives an accurate accounting of Colorado’s history, it doesn’t. It’s that it colors a painting of the true Colorado spirit and the bravery of those who built this beautiful, once rugged state.

Michener masterfully shows our dry high-plains as a stage for life and death struggles. He describes the personalities that would say goodbye to all they knew to chance a survival in an untamed, savage and mysterious territory.

If there was one word that encapsulated his story, it’s the same word that encapsulates what made Colorado the destination state for hundreds of years: risk.

To modern generations “risk” is seen as “danger” or synonymous with gambling, a roll of the dice. But that’s not risk.

“Risk” is the quest to manifest a goal over calculated odds. Risk is to employ one’s talents and resources to obtain a potentially unreachable outcome.

Every entrepreneur understands risk, knowing even when you do everything right, failure is still an easy outcome.

Michener’s book captures a Colorado now lost. It’s a Colorado where courageous people risk writing their own biography. To build. To create. To do it their way, or not do it at all.

Mitchner’s book became a sensation about the time the nation was celebrating it’s bicentennial. It’s story, the Colorado story, was a proxy for the American story.

As we look at 150 years of Colorado statehood, we also get to examine how Colorado has changed since “Centennial” was first published in 1974. Growing up in the 1970s in Colorado, I saw that spirit of risk and self-direction.

The state was still drawing oil-and-gas wildcatters, artists of all stripes and even a new tech entrepreneur that dealt in one and zeros, not rocks and cattle.

Mountains remain, culture changes

Now 50 years later, it’s hard to recognize many of the Colorado qualities Michener celebrated.

Colorado no longer beckons people to be left alone. It beckons people who want someone else to manage things. The frontier mentality has given way to the HOA mentality.

Risk has become something government promises to protect us from instead of something free people willingly embrace.

Every new regulation is sold as safety. Every permit is justified as protection. Every entrepreneurial gamble is treated with suspicion until a bureaucrat approves it.

We still have mountains, rivers and those impossible sunsets that make even lifelong Coloradans stop for a moment. The scenery survived.

But scenery alone isn’t the magic.

The magic was always the people willing to bet everything on themselves — men and women who crossed plains, climbed passes, dug mines, started businesses, built ranches and towns, and accepted failure was the price of having the freedom to try.

Michener understood Colorado wasn’t merely a place. It was a state of mind.

Reading “Centennial” today feels less like reading historical fiction and more like opening a time capsule from a state that’s slipping away. It reminds us this state wasn’t made extraordinary by government. It was made extraordinary by people.

It was made extraordinary by people who demanded to be free enough to fail spectacularly or succeed beyond imagination.

As Colorado turns 150, I hope we remember the spirit that created it. Because mountains are forever. A culture isn’t.

And once that spirit is gone, no amount of preservation can bring back the Colorado that Michener knew.

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.