What unfolded at Monday night’s meeting of the Aurora City Council was not governance. It was performance. Carefully staged, morally theatrical, and intellectually thin. A civic chamber meant for deliberation became a stage, and a resolution presented as public business functioned instead as a prop in a familiar drama: America as villain, crisis as currency, and elected officials as self-appointed redeemers.
This was Theater of the Absurd, performed with conviction but not seriousness.
The setting matters. City council chambers are instruments of lawful authority, not soapboxes for ideological display. Yet the resolution before council was never designed to solve a discrete, local problem facing Aurora. It did not address police staffing levels, response times, budget tradeoffs, infrastructure strain, or measurable outcomes. It was designed to smoke signal. To declare — solemnly and dramatically — that Aurora, and by extension the United States, has become morally intolerable. Systemically cruel. Structurally unjust. In need of emergency rescue…