Like my neighbors,  I’m proud of the city where I have lived for some three decades. It is enough time to see some two lane streets morph into five lane traffic arteries. I worked in the then-two small community hospitals before one swallowed up the other and got big; when slumbering Fitzsimons Army Medical Center awakened as the new University Medical Behemoth. My city of Aurora is not as glitzy as many others where people live behind gated gates. We are a tough, bare knuckled fighting community that welcomes strangers from around the world. Sometimes it seems we see as many people here as those represented by flags flying at the United Nations. I find it necessary to declare my pride and gladness of belonging today because I wondered why certain politicians resorted, with a broad brush, to paint Aurora black, pronouncing to the national media that Venezuelan gangsters had taken over and were running the city. 

Thanks to awake Aurora voters, City Council member Danielle Jurinsky — who had declared Aurora a territory under the rule of Tren de Agua — and her MAGA  soulmate, Steve Sundberg, both lost in the last election.

I did not know much about Jurinsky until she was announced on television and other media as protector of the City of Aurora from the hordes of Venezuelan invaders. The cause of the furore was: a small band of Venezuelan gang members had a disagreement in a dilapidated, run down high rise in the City of Aurora. A neighbor took some photos of  three to five gang members with guns — an abundant and legal commodity in America — arguing around an elevator. No one had been injured, no one killed and there was no property damage at the poorly kept rental apartment building.

As was to be expected, shouting “fire” in a theater led to the national media swooping in to explore, record and report on the “Venezuelan invasion.” I can only infer that Miss Jurinsky had been infected by the all-consuming desire for outrage that’s today’s brand of politics. It’s caused by a virus that comes embedded in the MAGA messaging: the more outrageous, the higher the decibel, the more likely you are to be paid attention to. It was a brand of  action that had worked  for Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both MAGA U.S. representatives.  

Jurinsky’s clamor for someone to save Aurora from legions of Latin invaders resulted in the then-presidential candidate Trump holding a political rally in Aurora. The noisy affair saved no one, repaired nothing — because Aurora was alright to begin with.  Jurinsky was rewarded by blessings from and standing close to the leader. 

I found myself resenting the Council woman’s behavior and actions because there was so little to justify what was so much insanely superfluous. The majority of hard-working men and women of this city were put upon by a band of noisemakers who somehow got elected, because the more rational would-be leaders were either intimidated or found the oxygen in the political space had been spent by the loud mouthed fleet of foot, who are not always rational in what they propose or how they do it.  

As I have watched and listened to this and other politicians of her ilk, approximations of what I read in Plato’s Republic Book V about the essentials of good philosopher leaders kept bubbling up in my mind: “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one,“ he says. Adding that, a philosopher leader would be a person who loves “the vision of truth.”

Is it unfair to expect those of us who wish to be leaders to also have an understanding of philosophy; something about the vision of truth. Sadly, we are in an age when noise passes for meaning and empty words stand for facts.

In our high minded critique of MAGA leadership we tend to excuse voters who are part of the equation. Meaning that somehow Jurinsky and Sundberg convinced many to vote for them. But as we see from time to time, what is promised is unimportant and reasons for our votes sometimes mysterious. 

I have spilled this much ink to celebrate the election of a new group of reasonable and less raucous council members. Voters showed up to uproot the too bright and blinding voices of Aurora’s last decade, saying, don’t trash our city.   

Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students ‘STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, a Huffington Post blogger, a past columnist for Denver dailies and is featured on the podcast, “Never Again.”