What Will We Do?

The July edition of 5280 is always one of our readers’ favorites: The “Top Of The Town” feature takes up a massive amount of real estate in the issue and spotlights the things to do, places to go, and uniquely Denver experiences we’re excited about. We are not publishing that feature this year. Months ago, we decided it would be impossible to do that package right; because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t know which establishments would be open in July, let alone how we could accurately evaluate them. All of that seems so long ago. As we remade “Top Of The Town” into “Reasons To Love Denver,” an appreciation of how our residents faced the pandemic, a white Minneapolis police officer killed a black man named George Floyd, leading to widespread protests. On May 28, the demonstrations reached Denver, and they were still going well into June, at which point we decided it was important to include these developments in our story. The confluence of events—a wildly contagious and deadly virus and a lethal social virus that has dehumanized black Americans for centuries—upended life in the United States like nothing since, perhaps, the Great Depression. This time is a reckoning for all of us. Our health care system is broken, and we all know it. Our society is built on institutional racism, and we all know it. The question now is, what will we do about it? Where will we go from here? One place to start is to acknowledge the inspiring acts we’ve witnessed over the past few months, many of which we’ve highlighted in our package. The rest is up to us, individually and collectively.