The Colorado Springs Gazette final

Love and hate in Colorado Springs

VINCE BZDEK vince.bzdek@gazette.com

A week ago Saturday night, love and hate came to blows on a Colorado Springs dancefloor. On the same night a killer motivated by hate hunted down the patrons of a LGBTQ+ nightclub, we witnessed an American hero motivated by love for his family and his community risking his life to stop the killing.

In the same 5-minute span in the same nondescript storefront in the east suburbs, Colorado Springs experienced the worst of America and the best.

Anderson Lee Aldrich is being held on suspicion of murder and hate crimes after donning body armor and brandishing a long gun and other weapons to bloody one of the few safe spaces in the city for the LGBTQ+ community.

And then came Richard Fierro, who cared more about protecting his wife, daughter, daughter’s boyfriend and everyone else in that club than he cared about his own life. The veteran of four combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan charged through the chaos, tackling and beating him into submission with the gunman’s own gun. “He was there with his wife, who is a celebrated Latina business owner. Was there with his daughter, and his daughter’s boyfriend who was killed that night,” Attorney General Phil Weiser pointed out in an interview with one of our editors, Luige Del Puerto. “Richard Fierro is an American hero. His family is a great American story of inclusivity, of serving and supporting others.”

Fierro co-owns a brewery whose motto is “Diversity, it’s on tap!”

If you’re going to make an argument about who better defines Colorado Springs at the end of the year 2022, in a town of 100,000 vets and 39 breweries and a thriving gay community, you’ve got to go with the vet who likes beer and embraces inclusiveness.

Some stories and broadcasts in recent days have been trying to make the opposite argument, that Anderson Lee Aldrich somehow typifies Colorado Springs because of 30-year-past battles in the culture wars, some of which started in the Springs. A

recent headline in the New York Times said “Shooting Leaves City Questioning How Much has Changed.”

This is bunk.

This is the mark of irresponsible, sloppy thinking in my view. The idea that you can blame a mass shooting on where it happened is ridiculous. To blame a city or a city’s past for the actions of a disturbed mass killer is outrageous, really. Do we believe Uvalde somehow bred a hatred of its children before those 19 children were murdered? Had Sandy Hook somehow bred a hatred of its schools?

Aldrich is not a product of Colorado Springs. He moved here within the last couple years and his path was set long before, by an extremely troubled childhood marked by a mentally ill porn star father and a mother in and out of jail herself. He was born 10 years after the fights over Amendment 2.

Panicked commentators are rushing to make sense out of this horror by looking for something larger to blame, trying to attach history and meaning to it so that we can better assimilate it. But you can’t make sense out of the senseless. Making leaps of logic and speculative connections and explanations are obscene in the face of such evil.

“What I have emphasized to the national press, this community should not be defined by a single person,” Mayor John Suthers told me. “We should be defined by our response to this.”

It’s that response, I would argue, that will be remembered. How the community has come together to rally support for its LGBTQ+ community, the mayor sitting in the front row at the All Souls vigil for the victims, the police chief using careful pronouns to describe the victims, the giant rainbow flag unfurled from the rooftop of City Hall, the $1.6 million raised for victim’s families, the thousands of young people streaming by the site of the shooting to make pilgrimage and leave bouquets.

“Those sorts of activities, that is what should define our community, not what is going on in the head of one single individual,” said the mayor.

I see a community defining itself by love in the face of hate.

Though it is absurd to draw lines between this city’s past and this killer, that doesn’t mean this can’t be an inflection point for our city and state in how we treat the LGBTQ+ community going forward. We can seize this moment and take increased devotion from these deaths to smother old reckless habits of hate with love.

Weiser said the shooting was “a call to all of us to look at that hate and ask what do we do about it.”

“What we all need to do is recognize that the level of hating and demonization can lay the groundwork for violence. Hate against any group, LGBTQ, Asian Americans, Jews, African Americans … we have to stand firm on this principle, we have to tone down the rhetoric. It’s America’s founding vision, ethos, e pluribus unum, from many we are one. We need to honor that work now more than ever.”

Psychologists we’ve talked to help explain why this is so important. Some in the LGBTQ community engage in self hatred and self destructive behaviors because of the way the larger society makes them feel about themselves. Aldrich may be an example of this. If you are constantly fed signals and political slogans and shaming words that render you less than human, it’s nearly impossible not to internalize that. And self-hate can manifest itself into hatred toward others. Words form thoughts and thoughts form actions, so our words can lead to real harm of our fellow human beings, or worse, prompt them to harm themselves.

That’s why I was especially cheered to get a letter to the editor on Thanksgiving from 52 members of the local clergy pledging a new day of respect for LGBTQ members of our community. They, too, see this as an inflection point in the battle between love and hate.

“In response to the horrific murders at Club Q last weekend, we write as people of faith and faith leaders in the Pikes Peak region,” the letter stated. “We write to urge an end to political, civic, and religious hate speech against the LGBTQIA2+ community.

“Hate speech dehumanizes our friends and neighbors. Dehumanization leads to violence. Our friends and neighbors deserve a safe space to be fully themselves.

“And to the LGBTQIA2+ community: As leaders in a variety of faiths, despite our differences of belief and creed, each of us agrees that you are beloved — some would say God’s beloved. Some of us take comfort in the idea that God looked upon all of creation — in all of its diversity — and said a resounding: “It is good.”

LOCAL & STATE

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2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/281749863367191

The Gazette, Colorado Springs