R*E*S*P*E*C*T,

The Budgeteer’s predictable editorial chastising Red Plan opponents for booing at a recent School Board could have used a little perspective.

It echoed Ralph Doty’s column from the previous week which I enjoyed addressing in a little series of posts I called Ironies Abound 1-5.

Jana Peterson, the Budgeteer’s Editor, who I must acknowledge has bent over backward to give anti-Red Plan folks a forum, puts great stock in the recent crusade to bring civility to Duluth’s politics. She trots out Representative Roger Reinert to reinforce her message with a gentle little lecture.

I think I was still serving on the School Board when the Duluth Superior Foundation (a very vital part of Duluth’s philanthropic community) asked my Board to support a pledge to honor Minnesota Niceness. That isn’t what they called it but the pledge included a great many virtues to civilize Duluth’s rougher elements. It came with a pretty poster illustrating the virtues. I voted to approve the campaign but even then there was something about it that smacked of the winners telling the losers how to behave or maybe liberals telling conservatives how to behave. It condescended to tell the smart alecks of the world, folks like Mark Twain, to be solicitous and deferential when speaking truth to power.

I don’t think I’ve ever booed anyone, ever. This wasn’t part of my family’s tradition. I always disapproved of booing at baseball games which of course made me a priss because booing at the ump is like the cinnamon in America’s apple pie. Coming from a bourgeois family booing was the province of sore losers and that’s not the kind of people my family were. They would have endorsed the civility pledge.

By the time I finally got elected to the School Board I had come to terms with Duluth’s sometimes irascible politics and that helped me through many angry crowds. I didn’t surrender to them when I disagreed but I did my best to keep an honest dialogue open. I sat through at least four meetings that were the equal of the last Board meeting: the decision to bring in the Edison Schools – a near teacher’s strike – three city wide meetings in 2001 one of which featured 1,000 furious people raked the Board over the coals to save 5 elementary schools and finally; passionate hockey boosters who turned a blind eye to a coach’s treatment of his team so long as he brought home trophies.

What’s been missing from the Red Plan debate is debate itself. There has been no two-way street for two years. This decision was made at least two years ago (some of us suspect three years ago) and that was the end of it. Lecturing the powerless after two years of futile lobbying to defer to the powerful for civility’s sake reeks of disdain.

Thank goodness that the disenfranchised don’t always take their medicine like obedient children. The colonists of 1776 didn’t defer to King George and Techumseh didn’t defer to the Great Father in Washington when the tribes of the Ohio Valley were being “negotiated” into moving across the Mississippi River.

The Budgeteer’s column is mistitled using as it does Aretha Franklin’s R&B hit R*E*S*P*E*C*T. The way the Budgeteer interprets the song it could have been telling folks to behave like Uncle Tom. Uh Unh, No way. It was an angry song sung by a vocalist whose “people” had been denied their humanity, their civil rights, whose taxes financed white schools while their own children got hand-me-down schools, and finally whose votes were denied them so that they could not win redress. Which side of the Red Plan Debate fits this analogy?

Franklin’s folks went by the rules, protested peacefully got billy clubbed and pummeled with water cannons then got thrown into prison for standing up for their rights. By the time Ms. Franklin sang this anthem her people were pretty pissed off. R*E*S*P*E*C*T isn’t some preachy Sunday sermon its a threat of Hell to pay if the warning isn’t heeded.

The booing at the last School Board meeting was the rumbling of voters who were sick and tired of School Board members rolling their eyes and self righteously claiming a power that no other school board in Minnesota history has ever exercised. Aretha was dead on. A small, stubborn, powerful, incurious minority needs to show the community a little R*E*S*P*E*C*T.

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