Yesterday, Saturday, was the first day I fell below 200 visits to the blog in almost a month. It was a Saturday and I didn’t put a single new post on the blog. It means that I’ll have all of sleepy August to improve on my stats.
I tried for a couple hours to figure out how to import a cool graph showing the tremendous rise in Lincolndemocrat readership but kept being foiled by an image that I couldn’t paste into this site. It showed a very satisfying upward curve.
At present I only have anecdotal evidence that my side is the one that most Duluthians sympathize with. I got yet another anecdotal confirmation of this in Church today when a fellow congregant told me how her friends all think we are being taken for a ride but that fear its too late to stop. I got the same message in the supermarket right after church when an older fellow and his wife stopped me. “You probably don’t remember me,” he said. I took a look and said “Are you Mr. *******?”
He was a long retired principal I last talked to a quarter century ago. Once again he said his friends all of whom opposed the Red Plan felt that there was no stopping it. Au Contraire, I told him. A lot of it is a foregone conclusion, I admitted, but only a third of it has been contracted out. (Although you can bet that Dr. Dixon will whip his sacrificial lamb school board members to authorize as many additional contracts as possible before the next school board election and possibly even after they are defeated.)
I have the luxury of thirteen weeks before the next election, a full slate of candidates who will take over in January, a popular issue, an ongoing suit against the District and clay footed bullies as my foes. While it is true that for the moment my foes have succeeded in scaring people away from me because they have no scruples about intimidating people this is but a minor inconvenience. The worst thing they could do to me, and the chances of their doing it are remote, is to send me to jail. The second worse thing they could do to me is financially ruin me and, once again, their chances of doing this are remote.
My wife came home a couple days ago to tell me that she’d heard from two sources that a law firm would be sending me confirmation of an impending law suit. She hates politics, thinks my fight against the District is a waste of time and, I’m sad to say, seems to believe the word on the street that I’ve become a nasty person. She never ever reads my blog to have made this determination for herself. She certainly understands the financial risks should I have crossed the wrong threshold. She works for the biggest company in Duluth which is dwarfed by Johnson Controls Inc.
She also knows I have left a very long trail of electoral defeats which don’t bode particularly well in the lopsided fight I seem to be waging at the moment. Furthermore our finances are a tad more precarious than they were before last year’s economic collapse. I told her I’d already heard the rumor directly from the aggrieved party.
Despite all this she betrayed not the slightest hint of fear or recrimination. We opened a bottle of wine and had a lovely evening together while I read the “Thunderbolt Kid” out loud. I am a very lucky man.
Over the next few days I will write less about the behind the scenes things that make my allies so fearful. Instead I will be keeping a diary for my own use. I will consult it to finish writing the scandalous book Ralph Doty promises I will write about the Red Plan.
I will also devote myself to explaining “Where we are now” in posts which will describe how a new school board can make significant changes to the Red Plan, offer them up for a public vote and save tens of millions or perhaps a hundred million dollars in the process.
