Bob Walser Unwittingly Stung by the Activist Hornet

One of the problems with achieving the action needed at the local level is that most people lack the courage for the required commitment to confrontation as necessary.

 

The revolutionary must have no regard for the feelings of people in their professional capacity.  This is different from caring about people in their personal lives:

 

I wish everyone well in their familial lives and within their personal universes:  I hope that their marriages are successful, that their children thrive, and that everyone in their private sphere is happy and healthy.

 

But if people propose to occupy positions that only exist to promote excellence of education for our precious children of all demographic descriptors and, frequently receiving sizable salaries under that guise but failing to act in ways beneficial to children, I have no reluctance to hurt their feelings with brutally honest assessments of their failed performances and moral reprehensibility. 

 

Members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education do not earn big salaries but many of them have outsized political ambitions, often accompanied by a need to resolve problems pertinent to personal identity.  The current composition of the school board of KerryJo Felder, Don Samuels, Jenny Arneson, Siad Ali, Kim Ellison,  Nelson Inz, Bob Walser, Rebecca Gagnon, and Ira Jourdain is among the worst I have seen among many other wretched school boards.

 

Bob Walser is the worst.

 

He walked into a hornet's nest in the aftermath of the Thursday, 29 November, meeting of the MPS Board of Education Finance Committee and will never recover. 

 

There Walser  encountered a hornet that he should have known was eagerly willing to render the confrontational sting.

 

Walser had taken up a great deal of time at the Finance Committee meeting with questions posed variously to auditors (technically the regular finance meeting had given way at a certain point to an annual audit meeting) and to MPS Finance Chief Ibrahima Diop, purportedly seeking greater accuracy of information rendered for citizens rather than specialists, the kind of information sought by Walser and the subcommittee of concerned citizens formed in the expressed interest of accountability and transparency. 

 

In the aftermath of the meeting I greeted Sharon El-Amin, whose candidacy in the recent 6 November 2018 electoral contest for an At-Large seat on the MPS Board of Education I vigorously supported.  She was in the audience, as matters were revealed to me, as an extension of her participation in the Walser subcommittee.  As our conversation ensued, I conveyed to her the abiding reality that ibrahima Diop is one of the best school finance chiefs in the nation, served also by many staff members working under him that are among the best at their own position.  I told Sharon that if she sought additional information on the financial health of MPS, which had just been given a very favorable review by the auditors, she should seek that information directly from Diop rather than Walser.  A big part of Diop’s modus operandi is transparency and accountability, campaign themes for El-Amin that make her interest in the putative aims of Walser understandable.

 

But I told her that Walser did not have the wit to realize that finance is not the current major dilemma of the Minneapolis Public Schools;  that dilemma is in fact the academic program that is the whole reason for a school district existing.  I told Sharon that Walser’s parroting of the philosophically corrupt rhetoric of education professors and position as Minneapolis Federation of Teachers sycophant renders him the very worst member of a terrible board.

 

At that point, Walser came up, interrupting the conversation that Sharon and I were having and, hearing his name in my reference, asked, “What about me?”

 

Wow.

 

Walser did not know about or hadn’t the sense to realize the danger lurking in that hornet’s nest.

 

I lit into him with a recall of the above account of his intellectual corruption and misplaced focus.

I challenged him to debate me in a public forum under formal rules of disputation.  He avowed that he was no debater.  I told him that, yes, I was certain that he was speaking accurately on the matter of his inability to express himself coherently in public but that he was cowardly to continue to spout his rhetorical nonsense in the absence of the wherewithal to put those views before the public in the context of my cogent views.

 

Walser strolled away sheepishly, metaphorical tail hanging metaphorically listlessly.   

 

El-Amin had borne witness to the truth about Walser. 

 

We walked together out of the assembly room.  El-Amin must now process what she heard as she circulates in other groups of which she is leader or participant in the interest of students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Walser walked into a hornet’s nest and endured a sting of enormous moral force.

 

That hornet will now be at heightened pursuit of this unwary intellectual wanderer.

 

For this hornet stings willingly those who bode harm for the precious creatures in the nest.

 

And so it goes in the confrontational spirit demanded of the revolutionary activist willing to call people at the local level in face to face conveyance of their corruption and their failure.