Letter: We can do better than Boebert
Growing up in a Catholic family and attending a Catholic school, I learned from an early age about appropriate behavior. We may not always agree with a parent or teacher, but in their presence, when they were speaking, we listened politely. There were ways in which we could express our disagreement, but there was a time and a place and we should be well-mannered.
As an adult I taught in a small college for 30 years. Then I was in the position where I expected consideration while teaching, but was open to honest discussion and disagreements. I tried to listen to students who had differing opinions, but tended to flunk those who wrote papers expressing those opinions as facts. One of the larger departments on our campus was Education, where students were trained to be teachers. That department had a strict code of behavior for their majors.
Any student who behaved in class the way Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene did at the State of the Union would be expelled from the program. When I had students who acted similarly, who were disruptive and impolite, I explained to them that one word from me could derail their future career plans. That behavior was not something our school would tolerate, and we did not want our trained teachers to have a reputation of that sort of behavior.
As residents of Colorado, we should want what my college wanted. Our representative in Congress should be a person of dignity, knowledge and esteem. What sort of example do we set when we send to Congress an ill-mannered representative who’s only goal is to attract attention and sarcastically sneer at anything with which she disagrees. That’s not who we are, at least not who I hope we are. We can do better than that.
Cathy Blaser
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