Well, this week’s column presents a problem: there are far too many things in Colorado Politics of interest, and I want to write about them all. But given my kindly editor is unlikely to let me expand my column to booklet length (Ed: correct), I’ll just have to mention a few things in a concise manner (Ed: good).

Well, concise-ish…

We are just a couple of days away from learning of the death of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. It’s a challenge to write about Graham, in that I don’t know which Graham to write about: the old Lindsey, who was a Republican, sure, but a reasonable man who served his nation most of his life, to include serving as an Air Force JAG officer, retiring as a full colonel. He was a man who was able to separate policy differences from personal detestation. He was a man who, back in 2015, said of Joe Biden, “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”

Then there is the post-Trump Lindsey Graham, a man clearly smart enough to know better.

Back in the 2016 presidential campaign, when Graham himself was running in the GOP primaries, Graham called then-presidential candidate Donald Trump a “jackass” and said he was “unfit for office.” He even took to the Senate floor after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol to declare “count me out, enough is enough.”

Yet, somehow Graham found a way to twist his reasoned view of Trump 180 degrees and became one of Trump’s most zealous minions, defending what the old Graham would have certainly thought was undefendable. My father, my person hero, had a saying, “when you can think two things about a person, choose to think the kinder.” So, I shall choose to remember Colonel Graham, a man who used to be a remarkable public servant.

I also want to mention a very good column in Colorado Politics by Vince Bzdek, who noted a report from the Cato Institute — hardly a liberal hotbed — recently published a survey on the occasion of our nation’s recent semiquincentennial. It seems Americans are still proud to be Americans, and say they believe in American ideals, they are not quite sure what those are.

Nearly 60% of respondents didn’t know the reason for the American Revolution, and less than half don’t actually know what we were celebrating on our nation’s 250th. Spoiler: The Declaration of Independence.

After more than 26 years of performing my one-man show as Alexander Hamilton, that troubles me. Appropriately, a tiny majority (51%) of Americans think we should study civics more in school, and that is absolutely the case. It should have been a much larger number, but I’ll take what I can get here.

But I’m not going to talk about any of that…

Instead, I want to again draw your attention to the terrific Out West Roundup, a marvelous summary in CoPo about stories from the western U.S. that likely didn’t make your local newspaper.

For the younger readers, a “newspaper” is an old timey thing that used to be where news was printed on paper and delivered to your door every day. Think TikTok, but with real information and written down.

Anyway, in the recent roundup, we learned the Drug Enforcement Administration had, over the past several years, in New Mexico, regularly allowed shipments of fentanyl to flow to drug-plagued communities, but not so in other states. The DEA argued it was letting “little” shipments through in hopes of lining up really big drug busts later. So, New Mexico has seen overdoses surge, even as they are dropping in other states. As a former military cop, I kind of get their thinking, but given the horror that fentanyl truly is, I can’t say I approve of letting any shipments get through in hopes of finding even bigger shipments.

One roundup story really irritates me. Utah has now marked a full year of fighting measles in the Beehive state. Unvaccinated folks in communities in every Utah county have gotten sick from an illness that is totally — and I mean totally — preventable. There are many, many things for which history will be unkind to Trump and his band of MAGA zealots, but one of the most tragic and most preventable are the illnesses caused by a, frankly, contrived fear of science and medicine RFK Jr. and his ilk have spread. In the history of the world, it is hard to think of any single development that has saved as many lives as vaccines.

My oldest brother, born in the mid 1940s, caught polio as a little boy, long before I was born. He was hospitalized in a ward with other children with polio, and he was the only one to live. He suffered post-polio complications, but he lived into his late 70s.

But I still remember, as a kid of perhaps 4 or 5, going to Dr. Pain (a great doctor name), the family pediatrician, where I watched him put a drop of polio vaccine on a sugar cube, and then I got to eat it. Delicious, and since I was vaccinated, I never got polio, and until the anti-vax crowd gained power, nobody got polio.

It’s back now, with the first case in more than 30 years popping up in 2022. When I was 14, I was a hospital volunteer (candy striper) and I remember once entering an old storeroom containing perhaps 50 old Iron Lungs, covered in tarps and collecting dust. I hope they saved a few.

When I was a kid, perhaps kindergarten or first grade, in the early 1960s, I got measles. I was home from school for two weeks and I still remember the red dots on my skin. But you know who never got, and never will get measles? My kids, because by the time they came along, science produced a vaccine that prevents measles. Oh, and they’ve also stopped whooping cough, at least in the vaccinated. And if you think that is no big deal, take a listen to what a baby, never vaccinated against whooping cough, sounds like with that illness. And yet, because of horrible and profoundly unqualified people being in policymaking positions, parents of far too many kids have vowed no vaccines will touch their little babies. And of course, it is the kids who will suffer, though the parents may well be racked with guilt, as they should be.

These are important battles that should be fought. It’s too bad we don’t have the old Lindsey Graham anymore, the pre-Trump one would have been all over this.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.