Nancy Nilsen begins her defensive column in today’s Trib by saying she’s not a “chick.” That’s what Mike Jaros called the four school board members running for reelection in his own column a short time ago.
It was the only thing in Mike’s column that raised my eyebrows. He’d used that line with me a month earlier and I got a kick out of it. Still, what’s said in a private conversation is usually a lot more bold than what’s put in print under your own name and circulated to thousands of readers.
I can assure Mike that he will suffer some slings and arrows for his candor but his turn of phrase will only make Mike more popular with the folks who count – the voters. The more Nancy and others complain about it the more most voters will smile to themselves and think to themselves, “I wish I’d said that.”
Mike can afford to be candid because he’s no longer has to worry about offending voters. For Mike the phrase “Dixon Chicks” is a fairly gentle way to express the contempt he feels for the process that brought us the Red Plan. The phrase is much more a comment on the surrender of the school board’s common sense to a charismatic Superintendent far more than it is a comment on their gender.
The moral high ground which Nancy attempts to scale crumbles when she dismisses Tom Kasper as a “NIMBY.” Name-calling is name-calling.
But is Tom a NIMBY? Tom and a great many of his neighbors began lobbying the Board to look for alternatives a year ago when they began to realized what the Red Plan had in store for their neighborhood. Later they had misgivings about the educational consequences of cramming 1600 people into a postage stamp and then the safety and environmental consequences. They discovered the limitations of the much lauded JCI planning sessions that, unlike a referendum, involved not much more than 5% of the Duluth population. It was the process of negotiating with a School Board that wore blinders and wielded a truncheon that led to Tom’s filing as a candidate.
The juggernaut that has shouldered Tom and his neighbors aside has been fueled by the prospect a fast buck made at the expense of our children’s safety, a neighborhood quality of life and the educational quality of the Duluth Schools. If that’s what a NIMBY is we need a lot more of them.
