The ********* over the summer severely impacted my posting to the blog. Anything I wrote could have ********************* at risk. I had to operate under the equivalent of radio silence and my readership suffered.
I’ve just counted the words posted over the past three months as I’ve been copying them into monthly folders to be printed out in hard copy. This will make it easier for me to organize and do further research for my book. In July, just before we began exploring the idea of ********, I poured 52,000 words into Lincolndemocrat. In August it fell dramatically to 17,000 and diminished to a paltry 12,000 in September when the school year was beginning and interest in the blog should have been picking up.
To my surprise visitors, although declining, never fell below an average of 200 a day. Now that my output has increased the numbers are back up. I’ve still got two days left of October but I’ve posted over 40,000 words this month. 2,700 are in yesterday’s unproofread Time Out post. It was a difficult post because I was trying to be a little circumspect when there is simply too much information available for someone grubbing around to put a little more flesh on the bones.
I keep learning more things. I bumped into one of our early supporters who wrote some powerful essays a long while back. This person got a new job and discovered afterward that someone from the Chamber of Commerce took the writings to show his employers perhaps with a view to threatening the new job. I know the Chamber guy. I’ve always liked him.
If a new school board is elected I expect a flood of similar stories because a change in the School Board will have the effect of belling the cat. The Superintendent will no longer have carte blanc and District employees who have clammed up for fear of retaliation may feel freer to pass along their impressions of the last years of the Dixon regime. I expect no vote of confidence. Whatever else our teachers did they did not persuade our students that the Red Plan was any great shakes.
What teachers think is especially important at election time. In a community of about 90,000 people a thousand teachers have about a thousand spouses and several thousand parents and voting age children and thousands more neighbors and friends and fellow church members. If the teachers feel strongly about something that attitude will never be far below the surface and will become general knowledge through out the community. When I was a candidate I tried very hard not to offend them. There are very few people in Duluth who don’t know a couple teachers even if they are retired. And retired teachers aren’t nearly so fearful. I’ve bumped into a number of them, some of whom took me to task when I was on the board, who have expressed great displeasure with the Red Plan.
It will be interesting to see how many orders I’ll get for my book before its in print. I’ll keep that bit of data a mystery. No need to spill all the beans and the doubt on that point will cause a few folks a little justly deserved gas.
