Colorado State Fair
August 25, 2004
If you live more than 50 miles outside Pueblo, you probably haven’t given a second thought to visiting the Colorado State Fair.
You should think again.
Too many years probably have passed since you got your fingers sticky with cotton candy, or chewed a corn dog off a stick or enjoyed a piece of good, old-fashioned funnel cake.
It would be a short trip back to your childhood to leave the low-carb diet at home for a day and stroll down the midway, trying your luck at winning a stuffed animal by tossing rings at a field of bottles or destroying the bulls eye with an air gun.
If you’ve still got children at home, you’d be doing them a favor – although they probably wouldn’t admit it – if you got them out of the city and had them meet a few 4-H farm kids. Some of their pride and work ethic might just rub off on the city kids.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt if they ran their hands over the prickly hair of a sow or through the soft wool of a newly shorn lamb. It might do them good to let their fingers touch something other than the keyboard of a computer.
There’s plenty for everyone at the fair, from rodeos and concerts to jelly-and-jam contests and carnival rides.
Some of my favorite childhood memories go back to the Boulder County Fair in my hometown of Longmont, where my eyes were opened wide by the carnies and the farm animals opened my imagination to a different lifestyle entirely.
What kid hasn’t dreamed of living on a farm or joining the carnival?
A few years ago, when I had visited the state fair in Pueblo for the first time, some of those childish thoughts returned as I walked down the midway, this time as an adult, and enjoyed the innocence of youth once again.
It’s good therapy to make that walk once in awhile, taking a break from the news in Iraq or from the political ads or from the latest shooting across town.
As the song by Anne Murray says, we could use a little good news today, and there’s no better place to see some goodness than at the state fair.
So do yourself a favor – and your kids if they’re still at home – and drive to Pueblo for a day or two before the fair ends Sept. 5. For a full list of events, consult www.coloradostatefair.com.
Both John Kerry and President George Bush have broken their silence over the flurry of negative ads that have flooded the TV networks on their behalf.
Bush has called for an end to the so-called “527” ad blitzes, referring to campaigns organized by independent political committees that have no formal ties to the Republican or Democrat parties. Kerry, who has benefited from most of those ads, has been critical of the ones that target him but has not gone as far as Bush in calling for a ban on both sides.
It’s unlikely that you will see any fewer of such ads in the future, however. In fact, it’s quite likely that there will be even more of them in the coming weeks, and they aren’t likely to get any nicer.
Neither candidate or party has control over the 527 ads – their content, their tone or their distribution. More than $60 million has been spent on pro-Kerry ads that attack the president, while Bush has benefited by a fraction of that.
Ironically the ads are the result of an attempt to take big money and nasty attacks out of the campaigns.
Congress passed the McCain-Feingold act to prevent independent committees from funneling unlimited money into the party campaigns, supposedly to reduce the saturation of the airwaves with advertising in the final months of the campaign. Instead, the independent groups just started financing their own advertising blitzes, with no control by the parties.
As so often is the case, Congress made matters worse rather than better.
