To the Editor:

Mesa County’s community speakers event was not a sideshow. It was one of the few times residents were invited to speak in their own words instead of through a prepared agenda. I brought a written account of that evening, because the remarks deserved more than a passing mention. What follows is what I heard in the room and why a business community that depends on public trust should pay attention to it.

Words on paper are not enough. That was the lesson of Constitution Day at the old Mesa County Courthouse on Sept. 17.

Mesa County and Grand Junction proclaimed Constitution Week. Mesa County Compass hosted the program. Greg Haitz introduced it the right way. Before the founders told us how government would work, the Declaration told us why it exists. Rights come first. Government is instituted to secure them. Lincoln called the Declaration an apple of gold and the Constitution the frame of silver around it. The frame matters only if people keep the principle alive.

Haitz reminded the room that other constitutions have promised speech, press, assembly and worship. The Soviet document did. Those words did not produce a free people. A republic depends on citizens who understand their rights and will practice them.

Three neighbors made that concrete.

Barbora Hurd grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. Her parents refused the Party. Her mother typed forbidden religious books at night. People watched what they said. When she became a U.S. citizen near the Statue of Liberty, she cried over the oath to support and defend the Constitution. Citizenship, she said, is not only receiving rights. It is accepting responsibility.

Ladis Visner left family and home when armored vehicles rolled into his town. He spent months in an Italian refugee camp and told the truth when asked if he had been a Party member. His book, “Escaping the Iron Curtain,” is the story of that choice. He put the economic question simply: Which system lets you keep the fruit of your labor?

Eric Gil spoke as the son of Cuban parents who fled Castro’s revolution as children. Castro did not campaign as a communist. Freedom was taken in pieces. Relatives put children on planes alone so those children could be free. Gil’s warning was local: There is nowhere else left to run.

A constitution cannot make us honest or brave. That part is up to us.

– Donald Hunger, Grand Junction