Undercutting overgrowth.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: Complaints about Colorado's economic boom - Column

It is winter. I am trying to stay warm by listening to songs by Modest Mussorgsky, the Russian composer. They are from his song cycle Sunless, which includes such toe-tapping favorites as Ennui and The Useless Day is Over.

And you think you had a tough month.

Hey, nobody ever said winter was going to be easy. The holidays are history. Your credit card bills have arrived. The party's over.

As for the future, two words: April 15.

Life is unfair. Life is unforgiving. But let's look on the bright side. Two words: Spring Training.

I am trying to look at both sides because I've been turning over Colorado's dilemma, the same phony issue we've been wrestling with since the Dick Lamm days: To Grow or Not to Grow, which is not even a question.

I say "phony" because we keep growing and we keep talking about growing and we keep growing anyway. As I recall, not even Dick Lamm did much of anything about this. Now Gov. Owens is going to widen 1-25, which should solve our transportation problems for, oh, a three-day weekend.

Some of you know that I came back to Colorado last year after living in the former Soviet Union for three years, which helped me understand why Mussorgsky drank himself to death at age 42.

I lived in a place called Kyrgyzstan, where the official unemployment rate is about 3 percent and the unofficial rate ranges from 40 percent to 70 percent, depending on who's doing the guessing.

It still seems marvelous to me that Coloradans can have 3 percent unemployment and still complain about growth.

I don't mean people should stop complaining. Heck, no - dissatisfaction is how we grow. Griping is America's engine of growth.

I mean literally that it is a marvel in the eyes of the world that we can.

But I want to look at this growth thing even-handedly.

This is why I quote Mel Brooks, who once said, "Tragedy is when I have a hangnail. Comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die."

(Brief aside: Before I foisted Mel Brooks on you, being the class guy I am I tried finding the equivalent quotation from Shakespeare. I typed "if you prick us do we not bleed" into my favorite search engine, dogpile.com.

I won't quote most of the web pages that turned up; I say if you want salacious sex, look to the White House, buddy, not ColoradoBiz.

I will say that GoTo.com seems to have a really dirty mind, while a couple of web sites quotable in a family magazine popped up on a search engine called Thunderstone.

The first was Sheyla Aberman's...