On rare occasions I compose blog posts on my regular computer writing software rather than directly onto my blog software. This post for instance is the more typical composition. I’m writing it direct to the blog software. I simply type, press upload, fini…….except that even after posting I may not be satisfied. For many posts I will switch back and forth from what I can see on my computer, a post being assembled and edited, to the actual view that readers can see on their computer unaware that it may change even while they are reading it.
I find it easier to spot typos and other mistakes on the same screen everyone else is looking at already uploaded to the Internet. Having seen that I then hurry back to make corrections on the blog software window before too many people come across the draft version which I have prematurely uploaded. Its a little like washing a window on the outside of the house and and then going inside to make sure there are no streaks that can only be seen from the inside.
I’ve found that a convenient way to edit since I was fighting Johnson Controls and the Duluth School District in court four years ago. Even then I knew my blog was being watched like a hawk by their lawyers and partisans. Their lawyers printed off reams of my blog posts in a futile attempt to win over Judge Hylden and have him dress me down in court for the uncouth things they claimed I was writing. It got them nowhere. I’m pretty confident of my ability to lay out my arguments and martial my evidence and analysis without being tripped up by my ego and vanity.
The danger, of course, in revising things online is that many readers could be logging on to a post in progress and get a view that I’m not satisfied with because its currently undergoing editing. That was true for the lawyers. They could have printed out a post in progress that was still in a state of dishabille. (fifty cents for a state of partial undress – one of my seventh grade spelling words) Sometimes that state of undress could last a long time if the post was one I spent an hour or more tinkering with. In those cases I often posted a note to the effect that I would be altering the final product. Once I was satisfied with my proofing and editingt I’d remove the note. I don’t post those notes so often anymore. There probably aren’t so many lawyers prowling around my blog nowadays, especially not at times like this – 3AM.
Last night I began writing some posts about a couple of my possible seatmates on the new school board. I didn’t put them in the blog window. I composed them on my computer before putting them in the blog editor. I want to make sure I don’t write anything without checking first that there isn’t any unhelpful streaking like on those windows I wash. There will be consequences for writing about these future seatmates based on premature impressions and too short an acquaintance.
I managed to get four good hours sleep and I was thinking about the course this series on: What would you do if you were me would take.
We’re getting a heavy rain that a few hours ago was a hellatious early blizzard in the Black Hills. I got up in the dark and sat in the sun room eating a Kit Kat candy bar listening to the rain pounding windows on opposite sides of the room. That’s when I thought again of Werner Heisenberg. He was one of the top physicists of the Atom Bomb era and he noted the difficulty of measuring elemental particles. YOu could easily measure the speed of a light photon but if you did you would likely alter its direction or you could measure its direction but to do so you would alter its speed. You could never know what it was doing when it wasn’t in a state of being investigated because the investigation itself altered its actions. He called this frustration the uncertainty principle.
The principle has wide application and I’ve always applied it to human behavior. What a person does driving up to an intersection at night is often quite different than the day time when more eyes are likely to be watching. People act differently when there is a camera about or when a policeman or minister or boss is in the vicinity. People post different things to Facebook depending on who they think will be reading it. Mom and Dad? Well maybe you won’t post that pic of you mooning your buddies at last night’s bash. Running for Congress. Well maybe you will think twice about posting that quick google phone picture of your crotch. Or maybe you will. The scientist, parent, policeman, boss, friend, can never be sure.
So, here I am about to speculate about the people I may soon be working with on the Duluth School Board. How will what I write about them affect their behavior? There are some things I would like to accomplish and that will require a majority agreement. Yet most people resent being talked about by others they have no control over and God knows folks often think I am ungovernable. I could easily alienate people and hurt my chances of accomplishing what I want. In many cases, as with Art, there is almost nothing I can do to satisfy him as to my good intentions and he’s a potential ally.
I do have a general set of rules I abide by. For one I am no more critical of other people than I am willing to be of myself. This actually has the salutary effect of keeping me on my best behavior. Like knowing a lawsuit could be pending should a disgruntled subject of one of my posts decided to sue me for slander. I’m very quick to post that something I’ve heard is a rumor. I’m very quick to make corrections of fact. I do take chances. For instance to get the $100,000 in bond money back to the dozens of people who wrote checks so we could pursue our case in Court against the School District and Johnson Controls I grudgingly signed an aggreement saying I would not continue to write about how JCI raped (my words not theirs) Duluth to build the Red Plan schools. When one of our lawyers assured me it would have no force of law, which I’ve never gotten a second opinion on, I signed it. My attitude toward this was that it was forced on me under duress, with a gun to my head, so that ethically, if not legally, I could ignore my pledge in good conscience. I could lie in good conscience because the public deserved the truth on the details of the no bid contract the company achieved through its own deceptions and mischief. It was true that I had a selfish motive in getting the money back. $20,000 of it was mine. I hope, however, that you will believe me when I say I was a lot more concerned with getting back the money of other folks who contributed to our losing cause.
Pardon my tangent. Back to Heisenberg.
I’ve come to expect that my candid writing will have a couple of affects. For one thing people, especially those with things to hide, will not unburden themselves to me for fear I will expose them. I don’t mind. It keeps me in ignorance to some degree but I hate having my hands tied. Besides, with the Red Plan I’m writing about an elephant in the room. Just because one person won’t tell me that he just got crapped on doesn’t mean it will be that hard for me to figure out what happened. Reporters call this getting second and third sources. Since there are hundreds of witnesses to the consequences of the Red Plan I have no dearth of sources to expose the truth however small each witnesses view. By now just in the past few weeks of door knocking I’ve gotten hundreds of critiques and only had two people maybe three close the door before I could get a word out edgewise.
Ah, but these people will not be sitting with me on the School Board.
I began my online Heisenberg experiments long before the blog. Sadly most of the year’s worth of posts seem to have disappeared and I never bothered to print them out onto paper for later reference. I put them in my old much neglected webpage Snowbizz.com in a section called School Board Diary. It was very much like my blog before the term had been coined.
That was back after the 1999 election when one of the four winners in the 1997 election was eager to see me defeated. You will recall that after 1997 the teachers successfully got four allies elected to the Board and the subsequent year threatened to strike. Frank Wanner trained most of his guns on me, the chairman at the beginning of the year, to win one more vote for a generous contract settlement. When he didn’t get it he turned to me at a meeting, pointed his finger at me and said, “You’ll be a target in the next election.”
One Board member in the four person minority was only too happy to help Frank take over the School Board only she was not particularly interested in confronting me face to face. Instead I could see her talking with people and looking up at me at breaks in our school board meetings only to read disparaging comments about me subsequently from the audience members in the local papers. 1999 was the year I was eager to figure out how to use the newfangled Internet. AOL and is clunky dialup was soaring. I had a daughter that wanted to log on to chat with strangers and I’d heard about how techies were using “webpages” to send their thoughts through the airwaves. I wanted one so badly even if very few other people were on the Internet themselves.
Half way through the year I bought Frontpage Microsoft’s first web page software and began experimenting. The dial-up connections were like trickles then compared to today’s Mighty Mississippi. You can upload the Bible in a nanosecond now. It sometimes took five minutes to upload a word document the length of this post back in the primeval times.
By 2000 I was up and running and my posts were noticed by my peers. I wasn’t particularly cruel but one in particular had sicced her allies on me and managed to defeat my friend and ally Mary Cameron in the 1999 election by getting friend attack us. It wasn’t long before the new superintendent Julio Almanza asked me not to post my thoughts about the personalities on the School Board. I politely refused to stop.
I no longer have those commentaries to look back on so I can’t prove that I was all that gentle in my humor but I do like people even my critics and can be pretty generous so long as they play fair. But if I don’t think they play fair I can be quite sharp. I’ve thrown a few elbows over the years and I must say I’ve never regretted having been too tough or too candid. Never! Not even when I wrote that a friend had said one of the Red Plan supporters on the School Board needed a brick upside the head (to knock some sense into her). Boy the lawyers tried to make a mountain out of that molehill and it certainly wouldn’t pass muster with today’s civility police.
I know that all sorts of viciousness gets onto the Internet. Children commit suicide because other kids taunt and humiliate them on Facebook. Doctors providing abortion services have their pictures posted on anti-abortion websites with others who have been murdered by pro life fanatics. The murdered doctors have x’s over their faces leaving the clear impression that there are eager assassins out their waiting to take out the remaining doctors. What I write is piffle compared to that.
And since its piffle I’m willing to flirt with Heisenberg. I’m willing to comment on the atoms sitting on the School Board even though my analysis might send them off on unpredictable tangents which could tangle up my own hopes and goals. But since I can’t imagine anyone sitting on the School Board wanting to intentionally hurt the Schools I’m not too worried about that. As long as I can see their side, however much I disagree with it, I’m not likely to send them spinning off into space. They might end up being a little wary. They might be prudent when talking to me and keep their lips zipped. They will probably be on their best behavior which will mean I’m likely to note it and give them credit for it.
Or they could be like my nemesis thirteen years ago. Whe she ran for reelection I worked very hard to help vindicate Mary Cameron who had been defeated by the nasty letters to the editor our nemises had aimed at her two years before. Mary got elected. The Nemesis did not get reelected.
Did my School Board diary play a part in that? I dunno. Back in 2001 I only had a counter that suggested a few folks looked at my website each day. Daily hits number in the dozens. Yesterday I had 359 “visitors” and 902 hits. A couple weeks ago an editor sent me an email wincing at my comments about his newspaper. Maybe I do make Heisenberg’s electrons scatter. I suppose reading this blog is a little like watching a hyena waltz into a flock of flamingos. Its a little colorful.
