It’s only August, and yet I find it almost impossible to avoid reading about next year, especially the election. Rutt Bridges has already announced and withdrawn for the Democratic nomination for governor. Ken Salazar, who hasn’t yet served a year in the U.S. Senate, is touted as a potential candidate. Bill Ritter, the Democratic candidate who could easily make me vote for a Republican, has his hat in the ring.
Nor is this early maneuvering confined to Democrats. Bob Beauprez will seek the GOP nomination, I read, while Marc Holtzman is a candidate except when he isn’t, and Scott McInnis and Ben Campbell might be in the running.
I pay more attention than is healthy to Colorado politics, and already this premature posturing is getting tedious. The election is nearly 15 months away. The primary is almost a year away. The precinct caucuses are next April. We have an important Colorado election in November concerning Referendums C and D, and there should be plenty of time after that to worry about electing a governor.
So why the rush?
This is the annual August “silly season,” when Congress and the legislature are adjourned and the president is on vacation, so there’s a shortage of real news.
But there might be more to it. Everything seems to happen earlier these days. It was once customary for the auto industry to jump the gun on the new calendar year by introducing next year’s models right after Labor Day.
That’s not nearly soon enough now. In its June edition, which must have been put together in April, an automotive magazine reviewed a 2006 Mercedes model. That wasn’t the biggest jump; there was also a review of a 2007 BMW.
Several weeks ago, a computer magazine e-mailed me a questionnaire about the “Best Products of 2005,” with a return deadline of Aug. 31. Does a great product that comes out in October of 2005 get to be in the running for “Best Products of 2006 That Didn’t Come Out In 2006,” or does it just get neglected?
I didn’t bother filling it out because I’m a “trailing edge” computer user, quite happy with 2002 motherboard holding a 1996 SCSI adapter that controls a 1997 hard drive. Let somebody else cope with the bugs, crashes and quirks of the new stuff while I get some work done.
At any rate, couldn’t we wait until the end of 2005 before determining what was best in 2005?
No more than we can wait for a holiday. It was bad enough when the Christmas stuff started right after Halloween, instead of waiting until after Thanksgiving, but recently I encountered something even worse.
Last month I had to go to Wal-Mart, and there were big back-to-school displays.
Back to school in July? Doesn’t that qualify as child abuse, to force innocent children to think about classes when they’re still recovering from the first-degree burns they got from using illegal fireworks?
Then I learned that this promotion wasn’t all that premature. Denver schools started the year on Aug. 15 and 16, and Salida’s schools start this week.
There are doubtless some who argue that starting school in the summer will improve education. Then there are are the sensible people, like Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.” He argues that kids need some unstructured time for goofing off outdoors – that treehouses and fishing near home are as important as learning about distant rainforests in school.
Granted, having school start in mid-August might somehow shorten the silly season. On the other hand, we must consider the children. If any would-be governor wants to amend our state constitution so as to forbid public schools from starting before Labor Day or continuing after Memorial Day, I’ll gladly sign the petition and support the campaign.
We can’t do much about how our society rushes things like model years, Christmas shopping and “best of” intervals. But we could quit accelerating the end of summer. Winter is already more than long enough.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
