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The O. Zone: Why write about policy when our democracy is circling the drain?
No, by all means, let’s keep doing this on the main highway through the Colorado mountains. Semi crash in Glenwood Canyon (photo courtesy of CDOT).
With temperatures in the Eagle River Valley surpassing 60 degrees this week, our snowpack – with less than a month to go before the end of ski season at Vail and Beaver Creek — is melting away as fast as our constitutional protections under President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Forecasters are promising some relief in the form of spring snow starting this weekend and hopefully ramping up into next week, but there’s little hope being offered on the authoritarianism front, unless you count the impressive but voices-in-the-wilderness efforts of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (where are you Democratic Party?). Here’s a hot tip on how you can make your voice heard locally coming up on April 5.
So why write about policy matters and things that might actually make peoples’ lives better? After all, the fascist freakshows in Washington these days are too busy leaking military secrets on cellphone apps or worrying about how they look in their official portraits in faraway state capitals like Denver, paid for by party loyalists. Nothing substantial is getting done in D.C. these days, except for the steady stripping away of individual freedoms and hard-earned benefits.
And make absolutely no mistake, all of these catastrophic cuts to the social safety net and benefits that Americans are actually entitled to (from Medicaid to Social Security) are being conducted by Musk’s shadowy DOGE in order to tee up massive tax breaks for billionaires that will explode the national debt.
But I still feel like most of my readers are interested in fixing things, not breaking them so the rich can get richer. That’s why I’ve added three new content categories on RealVail.com on topics I care about passionately: “Rail”, “Water” and “Ski”. All three are subjects I’ve had some success freelancing to various publications, along with occasional political stories.
In time, should the funding and freelance present itself, my goal is to add two more story categories: “Mental Health” and “Migration”. The first is self-explanatory and increasingly critical, locally and nationally, in these tenuous times, and the second would not be called “Immigration” because I learned over several years of interviews for a stalled book project that many people don’t want to move here permanently from other countries.
They’d be happy to work and go home and enjoy legal freedom of transit back and forth – labor migrants who are badly needed in many economic sectors, from health care to construction. But our legal system of migration and work visas is completely broken and tangled up in our bitterly divided politics. Someday, perhaps, we’ll come together with practical policies there as well.
The term “migration,” defined as “the movement of people away from their usual place of residence to a new place of residence,” applies to most residents of the Eagle River Valley, from seasonal workers to immigrant workers to second homeowners to those of us who just came for a ski season or two and wound up staying because it’s awesome.
The presence here of the very wealthy from around the world helps draw those critically in need of work in a chronically needy labor market – people who are sometimes desperate to escape violence and oppression in their home countries. Unfortunately, the term “immigration” has become deeply politicized by both major parties in the United States, especially Republicans.
In the meantime, in the interest of solutions-based policy reporting, I recently wrote about a proposal to take some of the enormous pressure off of Interstate 70 by pursuing what its lead advocate calls a truck-by-train rail bridge. The original story ran in the Gazette papers, was reposted on RealVail.com, and prompted reports by CBS, ABC and FOX TV in Denver.
That, as we used to say in my former role as a reporter for nonprofit websites, is the very definition of “impact reporting.” Will this idea, promulgated by former Amtrak conductor and ski train savior Brad Swartzwelter, ever take off? It likely makes too much sense. Why not continue to unsustainably pump billions of dollars into an inadequate and badly broken highway network?
You will find that story now on a page of archived “Rail” stories covering everything from ski trains to oil trains to U.S. Supreme Court deliberations likely to rewrite environmental law. Ditto for my “Water” reporting stretching from the proposed and seemingly dormant Whitney Reservoir plan to suck Homestake Creek water to the lawns of Aurora and Colorado Springs to the fight over the Colorado River and Supreme Court ripple effects on Colorado wetlands.
There you’ll see that in early February I reported the Trump administration was likely freezing federal funds approved by former President Joe Biden for the Western Slope purchase of Shoshone hydroelectric plant water rights from Xcel Energy. Now, nearly two months later, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reports Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd penned a letter to Trump’s Interior Department urging the release of those funds. Stay tuned.
Finally, as seemingly every news outlet in the country piled on the ski industry this season, particularly on the topic of labor strife and lawsuits targeting Vail Resorts in Park City, I tried to add some more nuanced reporting on all the factors at play with stories on the impacts of the multi-resort season ski passes and ski-worker unionization that first ran in the Gazette papers and then reposted on my RealVail.com here and here.
But if you think your local ski area being owned by a publicly-traded, multi-national corporation is problematic, you could have this guy for an owner if you live in Telluride. You’ll find all of these stories, plus some good, old-fashioned ski travel pieces from Japan to Canada under my newly added “Ski” archive.
Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.
David O. Williams
Michael Raymond Beckley
March 26, 2025 at 12:30 pm
Think back to when Lady Bird Johnson was getting the country’s interstate highways built, LBJ and MLK were getting civil rights brought to the front of America’s conscience. NONE of that sort of stuff could happen with the corporate bought and paid for politicians we have nowadays. I wish I had a suggestion other than move to Finland but I don’t. I do know one thing for certain however…..all the millions of idiots who elected the shit show we are suffering through are regretting it. AND if they’re not, they are simply delusional. I’m pushing all my chips in on Mayor Pete, and failing that,
Bernie and AOC, as the Democrats, are the saddest bunch of losers I’ve seen
David O. Williams
March 26, 2025 at 12:50 pm
Thanks for the comment, Mike. It’s clear that Trump and his broligarch backers are tackling their version of infrastructure investment. Their policies everywhere from Greenland to Ukraine are all about rare earth minerals to support their massive investment in power-sucking data centers and AI. Those technologies are not about sharing the wealth with a shrinking middle class and a growing lower class. They are about eliminating jobs and concentrating wealth in the hands of a few while doing everything in their power to stay in power. The winning strategy for Unaffiliated voters and Democrats going forward is “Economic Patriotism”, IMO. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/us/politics/new-economic-patriots-house-democrats.html