Memorial Day, the 2011 Legal Holiday

My very first legal holiday post was Memorial Day in 2009. Since then, the suicide rate among our nation's National Guard and Reservists has nearly doubled.

I started writing about legal holidays to help remind us why we have them. When we focus on what the law requires, we can lose sight of what is right. Required holidays become entitled holidays. Entitled doesn’t ask why.

I had the chance to talk with some Reservists in the United States Air Force’s 302ND Airlift Wing at Peterson Air Force Base during the trip described in my recent post on the Colorado Experience. The 302ND performs both military and humanitarian duties, moving people and supplies, fighting fires from 150 feet above ground, and converting their C-130s into enormous flying ambulances to transport our wounded from Afghanistan and Iraq (the vast majority of whom are transported by Reservists), and they do it all with part-time citizen-soldiers.  They talked of the pride the Reserve and Guard take in their work.  They talked of the challenges of longer and more frequent deployments.

I was raised in an active duty Air Force family.  I remember the stress my father's one year in Vietnam caused in our family.  I can only imagine how today's active duty, Guard and Reserve families are doing.

With less than one percent of our population involved in military service, we need to pause, before we launch ourselves into summer, to remember that Memorial Day honors the men and women who gave “the last full measure of devotion” in service to our country. Before firing up the grill or saving money at some sale, we need to remember why this day was originally called Decoration Day.

You don’t need to go a ceremony or a cemetery to be grateful for what they did for you. You can stop for a moment and think about the families gathered at our 131 National Cemeteries and countless private graves across the land to remember their loved ones, men and women who made this day, and each day after it possible for you and your family.

With gratitude and in tribute to all who serve our country and risk everything for us: the National Anthem performed by the Colorado Children’s Chorale at opening ceremony for the 2008 Democratic Party National Convention here in Denver. (Note the Color Guard--these gentlemen are Navajo Code Talkers. It was cool to meet them.)

Denver Leaders See Over Monument Hill: Colorado Experience

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery. --Wallace Stegner

There’s a saying in Colorado Springs: ‘Most people in Denver can't see over Monument Hill.’ -- Dirk Draper, Past Board Chair, Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce

I and about 150 other leaders from Denver’s business, nonprofit and government communities took a peek over the hill that divides us from Colorado Springs in a first step toward Stegner’s vision of cooperation. We were participants in Colorado Experience, a new program from the Denver Metro Chamber Leadership Foundation, the arm of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce with a vision to inspire a diverse community of leaders to improve Colorado. A metro Denver filter often colors that vision, however, with this program, the Leadership Foundation took an important step toward changing that bias.

The Chamber, the Leadership Foundation, and the concept of community stewardship are regular features in this business law blog for a simple reason. You can work to build a great business and I can help you avoid legal troubles on route to that goal, but if we don’t invest in our community, we are both destined to fail. Business does not happen in a vacuum. A healthy community provides business its customers, employees, and a place for us to live and raise our children. The Chamber and the Leadership Foundation help maintain that complex government/business/nonprofit ecosystem that allows our businesses to thrive.

Colorado Experience was two very full days of presentations from, and conversations and experiences with, business and political leaders from the Colorado Springs area. Together, we considered some critical issues in that region: the military, space and aerospace industries, water, education, tourism, the U.S. Olympic headquarters, fiscal policy and politics.



Some of us seeing over the hill. Thank you to my friend Andre Van Hall, a community steward and CEO of the Denver Athletic Club, for this image

Many of these issues, of course, don’t respect the Palmer Divide watershed, or even the Continental Divide, for that matter. Colorado Springs’s experience in these areas is both valuable to understanding that community and invaluable to informing our statewide conversations, conversations that will have direct and long lasting implications for our business community.

Our conversation with Dr. Bob Loevy, a forty-year professor of political science at Colorado College, and Jan Martin, recently reelected to her second four-year term on the Colorado Springs City Council was a highlight of the weekend for me. They reviewed for us developments that resulted in a political environment more defined by pessimism than optimism, and allowed fiscal troubles to compound to the point where the city would be defined, both nationally and internationally, not by its stunning location on the flanks of Pikes Peak, but as the city that couldn’t afford to keep the street lights on.

That notoriety contrasted starkly to economic development success stories in which the business community led Colorado Springs to attract and retain important institutions such as the Air Force Academy, the headquarters and many training facilities of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado, a school built on donated land and housed in buildings built with community-generated funding.

Dr. Loevy and Councilwoman Martin were frank in their descriptions of a community that had lost its sense of community; a city where, for some, a voluntary $300 annual payment to power the street light near one’s house was preferable to a tax increase, averaging $200 per year per home, that would turn on all street lights, open the city’s closed swimming pools, and take care of neglected parks.

Their refusal to give into the narrow mindedness or ignorance that leads to such thinking was inspiring and much more in keeping with Stegner’s reminder that it is our ability to cooperate and create, not our ability to go it alone, that sustains us in Colorado. As the state continues to deal with the complicated and contradictory web of laws confounding our ability to plan fiscal policy, their story, I hope, is one that defines our Colorado Experience.