Opening Day Remarks of State Rep. Dan Grossman
The following speech is the 63rd Colorado General Assembly opening day (January 10, 2001) remarks of Representative and House Minority Leader Dan Grossman.
Mr. Speaker, Madam Majority Leader, colleagues and guests, I thank you for the opportunity to address you today.I would like to take a moment of personal privilege to introduce my father Arnie, my mother Kay, my sister, Rachel, and Robin, the love of my life, and my grandmother, I call her Nana. Please help me welcome them.
Nana is 93. She just moved to Denver from Savannah, Georgia. Tuesday night Nana told me that she wanted to come down here today to see me sworn in as a state representative because she won't be around to see me sworn in as president.
First of all Nana, in the shape you're in, you could run for president.
And second, all we have to do is get my brother, Alex, elected governor of Florida, and I can be president by 2004.
This morning I would like to offer a special congratulations to the 23 new members of the Colorado House of Representatives.
When I have worn out my welcome in this body, and many of you will say that happened years ago, I will take with me many memories that will entertain me through the subsequent stages in my life.
I will laugh out loud when I remember the time that someone put hot-pepper jelly beans in the jar up here at the desk and Representative Arrington ate one. His face turned even redder than usual as he ran to the trash can. We never learned who did that.
And I will smile when I remember Gary McPherson’s green blazer and Tony Grampsas’s broad, gap-toothed smile. I miss them both.
As you start your tenure in this house, I urge you to enjoy your colleagues and your experiences and hang on to the memories that I hope will last a lifetime.
In Homer’s Odyssey, the gods were unkind to the war hero from Ithaca named Odysseus. Odysseus fought with the Greeks valiantly and, after a 10-year struggle, was victorious over Trojans. But instead of rewarding him with swift passage home to his wife and child, the gods subjected him to another 10-year struggle, this time a sea journey through the unexplored world where he met the likes of cyclops, the sirens and charbdys.
At times during the next 120 days, each of us will feel like Odysseus during his long journey home. We will feel lost and tempted and even persecuted. We will question why our good deeds and hard work are rewarded with nothing but anguish and frustration.
In other words, we will take ourselves too seriously.
On occasions such as today, it is easy to lose ourselves in the pomp and circumstance of the moment and forget that the people have sent us here to accomplish one simple task: to represent them honorably.
We sit in this grandiose chamber, we enjoy the respect we are given by staff and the lobby, and the stuffy hyper-politeness of parliamentary procedure; and our friends and families watch in amazement as our egos inflate like a hot-air balloon.
And, with the albatrosses of our oversized egos slung around our necks, we try to do the people’s business.
It is no easy task. It is difficult to serve others while hindered by hubris.
After all, serving in the Colorado House of Representatives is an important job, but it rarely requires heroics.
The minute men who fought and died at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill for an ideal called liberty, they were heroes.
The men and women who sacrificed their homes and their lives to preserve this union and bring an end to the American atrocity of slavery, they were heroes.
The men and women who were arrested, beaten and even lynched in the pursuit of fundamental justice and civil rights, they were heroes.
No, we aren't heroes. We are but part-time politicians in a world grown weary of politicians. We can only hope that at some point during our lives, when we are faced with adversity of such magnitude that only heroics will save the day, that we will find sufficient courage and fortitude to fulfill the role.
In the meantime, we simply should endeavor to perform our public service with the honor and fidelity that our constituents have bestowed upon us: not to be heroes; just to be leaders.
Each of us is here today because our constituents saw in us the characteristics of true leadership. Vision, dedication and courage.
True leaders possess the vision to see beyond the tracking polls and focus groups to determine for themselves what the important issues of the day are; they also possess the vision to appreciate the impacts of their actions on other people, other institutions and other times, and they adjust their actions accordingly.
True leaders are dedicated to principles rooted in deeply held beliefs and moral values; principles other than political expedience and self-aggrandizement.
True leaders have the courage to sacrifice self for the public good.
I am often disappointed by my own failure to live up to the high standard of true leadership set by people like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I am most proud when I feel that in some small way I have emulated their example.
Yesterday, I stood with my Democratic colleagues to announce our policy agenda. We call it our community cornerstone. We asked Governor Owens and Speaker Dean, and each one of you to help us exercise true leadership for the State of Colorado this session.
We asked you to help us show vision that recognizes that responsible growth management is essential to maintaining our quality of life unique to Colorado; vision that recognizes that our transportation plan needs more than more lanes, but a true commitment to a multi-modal solution; vision that recognizes that empowering local communities to provide affordable housing and open space will make Colorado a better place to live.
We asked you to help us to renew our dedication to creating world class public schools by demanding accountability from our local school districts while empowering them to reduce class size, recruit quality teachers, and teach character to Colorado’s children.We asked you to help us find the courage to reform our healthcare system to make it affordable, accessible and respectful of patients’ rights.I believe that tomorrow, when Governor Owens addresses a joint session convened in this chamber, we will hear that he shares these objectives. In the inspirational spirit of true leadership, I pledge to work with Governor Owens, President Matsunaka and Speaker Dean to realize these objectives.
Mr. Speaker, it is a secret to no one that you and I have had our differences in the past; some rooted in policy, some in process, and some only in personality. With your election as Speaker of the House, and my election as Minority Leader, many in this chamber and elsewhere expect our differences to dominate this session.
Indeed, it would be very easy for us to fulfill everyone’s expectations and spend the next four months bickering and feuding. But, although it may be against my nature as well as yours, I suggest that we take the more difficult route; the bipartisan route to progress.
Mr. Speaker, Madam Majority Leader, and Republican colleagues, as the Minority Leader of this House, I have a unique role. Often mine will be the voice of dissent and criticism, sometimes even defiance.
According to an old Yiddish proverb, if we all pulled in the same direction, the world would keel over. Sometimes our job will be to make sure the world does not keel over to the right.
Our task is to find ways to work together in spite of our often substantial differences.
A wise rabbi once said that the key to forging constructive relationships with those with whom we disagree, is to recognize the limitations of your opposition. Understand what it is that they cannot do without sacrificing who they are and what they believe.
Mr. Speaker, Madam Majority Leader and fellow members, I am confident that if we simply try to understand each other a little more, we will begin to see each other more as partners and less as adversaries.
But if we fulfill the prophecies of many and allow the people’s business to be submerged in a morass of partisan gamesmanship, our progress will be stymied and the cynicism of our constituents will be justified.
Many speakers and minority leaders have addressed this body in the past and have spoken of bipartisanship, only to watch, and sometimes enable, the ensuing session to digress into politics as usual.
We should demand more from ourselves and from one another.
As Martin Luther King Junior said upon acceptance of the Nobel peace prize in 1964, “I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.”
By refusing to take ourselves too seriously, by aspiring to the ideal of true leadership through vision, dedication and courage, and by appreciating each others’ practical limitations, we can attain the “oughtness” that will make us better legislators, better people, and maybe someday, heroes.
Thank you.