The Big Diff betw McD & the Other Council Candidates

3rd from left, 1964, big hair, freshman year at Clarke College.

 It’s hardly surprising that I am braver, tougher and more tenacious than any man on the Cascade City Council: by the time I was 14, my father was dead, my sibs and I had done stints in St. Mary’s Orphanage and in foster homes. By the time I was 21, I had waitressed myself through Clarke College—a hat-trick then—impossible now.

            Though I did all the course work for a master’s journalism at the University of Colorado, when I was offered a job writing for a Denver magazine, I figured: Why pay them to teach me to do something somebody will pay me to do? By the time I was 35, I was jet-setting back and forth to Europe 2x a year a publishing my own a little medical ultrasound catalog.

            I sold it, turned down a lucrative job in California, and returned to Cascade after Mom died because I didn’t want to lose touch with my parents, their place, their spirits. By then, I realized how very rare they were. Just how rare their plain-spoken, self-effacing honesty was!

        

     So I figure the main difference between me, the men on Cascade Council and the people running for it, is values. I know it is dishonest to pass an ordinance to force the less-well off portions of town to install new sidewalks. (In spite of what the Nat’l League of Cities says.) I know it is evil to give the tax money of struggling ordinary citizens to millionaires. (TIF, etc) I know it is corrupt to charge one citizen $17,000 for a vacated street, another $1,700 for a street the city has put in the flood plain and give a millionaire one free of charge. In private conversations with a couple of them, I think they may value fairness and justice on city council, but the votes don't always confirm it. A couple of them running are financial types, and they really scare me.