By Alex Burness, Longmont-Times Call
Boulder County, the liberal bastion that roundly rejected Donald Trump at the polls on Tuesday and in the streets on Thursday, needed all of three days to confirm some of the worst fears Trump critics long have held about his potential, and now stunningly real, rise to power.
In downtown Longmont the day after the election, Jose Beteta, an undocumented immigrant and the director of the county’s Latino Chamber of Commerce, was walking to pick up his son from daycare when, he said, two men toting rifles walked by, chanting about taking back the country.
In Louisville, Monarch High School Principal Jerry Lee Anderson had to interrupt classes last week to remind students via intercom that racist and anti-immigrant taunts, of which several were reported last week at the school, are not acceptable.
And in Boulder, Rabbi Fred Greene of the temple Har Hashem is faced with the impossible task of explaining to some of his younger congregants why they’re now targets of explicitly anti-semitic rhetoric at school.
“They’re being called, ‘k—,’ having aggressive jokes told relating to concentration camps,” Greene said.
It is difficult and sometimes fruitless to try making sense of why some people are compelled by hate. But the question of why these incidents are suddenly commonplace around the country — and, yes, even in deep blue Boulder County, which gave a greater percentage of its vote to Hillary Clinton on Tuesday than to Barack Obama in 2012 — is much easier to answer.
“People that have been on the fringes are feeling more empowered,” Greene said. “They feel like they have a seat at the table now.”
And why shouldn’t they?
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