JonBenet and Boulder

A column in the San Francisco Chronicle takes the recent JonBenet flare up to beat up on Boulder. Although a lot of the article is unfair, I must admit that this hit close to home:

The Ramseys were the wrong kind of people in Boulder. It's only OK to be rich here if you wear patchouli and pretend you live in a tent. The Ramseys didn't.

Inhabitants of Boulder are so convinced that a non-Boulder lifestyle is wrong that when JonBenet was killed, few people in town offered sympathy to the Ramseys. The killing was seen as a by-product of the Ramsey existence, of the conservative life. Violence is what you should expect when you aren't a feminist vegan who eschews leather shoes and practices bikram yoga.

Boulder has always carried the suspicion that if the Ramseys had behaved properly, JonBenet's life would have been saved. When you put your 6-year-old daughter in makeup and parade her around on stage, you've made a choice to live on the dark side and you get what comes to you. Boulder was smug when JonBenet was murdered. If the Ramseys' life went to hell, it was proof that the conservative life was the wrong one.