Tony Scallon writes to Minneapolis Issues to urge that the
polished rhetoric of Abdi Warsame’s speech to the Ward 6 DFL convention ought
to quiet concerns about Mr. Warsame’s notion of the good in politics. This
despite the well-documented outrage being expressed by seasoned veterans of the
DFL’s caucus and convention processes. And given the laundry list of
recollections intimated by Dave Garland, there is ample reason to doubt the
integrity of the DFL party’s internal motivations as against the expressed
letter and intent of that party’s origins and current fundamental documents.
Well it’s a messy business, all right, but how about not
throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
As Andrea Schaerf has appropriately suggested, the swamping
of precinct caucuses only goes so far – too much gasoline, as it were, and not
enough fire prevention or firefighting assets in place. The issue, as she
suggests, is that these organized marches of one part of the “vox populi” only
obtains if there is sufficient combustible material beyond the often docile
ranks of the disaffected participant/victors in this presumably structured
partisan environment.
Item: it’s well known that
R.T. et al were dismissive of legitimate East African concerns, whatever the
public rhetoric ladled out, save only for an investment in Hussein Samatar’s
nascent development corporation. A “causus belli”, IMHO with reference to the
less-established but rapidly growing interest in the mechanics of nomination,
endorsement, and potential election in what is an essentially one-party city
with seriously flawed policy practices in that party and in the behavior of a
whole string of elected incumbents up to and including our state-level
governing bodies.
Item: Conversely, the
track record of our incumbent City Council Member, sitting Vice-President of
that body CM Robert Lilligren, is frankly formidable. His vita is readily
available from his campaign website. I know from Mr. Warsame’s introductory
letter announcing his intention to seek the Ward 6 seat on the Minneapolis City
Council that he has the perquisite professional background and leadership
involvement in his personal portfolio. But not at the level of a
thirteen-member governing body who made short shrift of the Green Party
incumbents in the early years of the first decade of this century while
continuing a well-worn practice of kowtowing to developers and major business
interests for whom grassroots initiatives were, and still are, seemingly much
more annoying than valid.
Item: On sexual and
gender diversity issues, one must look askance at Mr. Warsame’s elision of any
potential commitment to the well-established policy profiles lately achieved in
Minnesota’s public life and determinedly valid in the City of Minneapolis. Will
we see continued commitment in these matters from a conservative Muslim cohort
who, like many evangelicals, see moral and religious turpitude as definitive in
these matters, whatever the increasingly probative value of research in the
academic world that establishes such diversity as part of the normal range of
possibility in homo sapiens sapiens.
Would we see vigorous action from either of these major
candidates regarding the high-risk lives led by our hundreds of homeless
teenagers, whatever their sexual or gender understandings? As a large municipal destination magnet, we as
a society are confronted in these matters by bullying, parental rejection,
suicides, and inimical pressures from
sexual predators, the black-market drug culture, gang-related intimidation, and
an often hostile police force.
Item: What can be done
to address the ever-growing demand curve as baby boomers reach retirement and
grasp that their personal preparations are proving to be hopelessly inadequate.
This has been a major concern for a very long time in Minneapolis and elsewhere
and face it – we won’t all be able to live in market-rate condos and apartments
or shell out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for essential medical
procedures or supportive living environments.
Item: We are in a
serious financial pickle in the current reality of hugely expensive “trophy
projects” – stadiums and convention centers that are reliably predicted to be
net loss long-term investments nationwide. Just imagine what a billion dollars
would do in the realm of essential municipal services right here in
Minneapolis!
Who shall best advocate for a more sensible balance in the
assignment of resources here? This is not a parlor game or a popularity
contest. Lives are lost, children are marked for life, and families are torn
asunder with increasing regularity as the banks continue to hoard assets and
corporate leadership awards itself grossly inflated financial benefits,
outsources productive activity to places far from the land of ten thousand
lakes, and routinely uses offshore tax havens and other rather obvious public
subsidies rather than to share in constitutional requirements about the good of
the whole.
Item: Secrecy versus transparency has become the norm
in our municipal governance lately. This is unacceptable for a host of
historical reasons. When coupled with the increasing militarization of our law
enforcement establishment sans meaningful oversight, there’s a recipe here for
violence here that may make the Plymouth Ave. riots seem minor in comparison.
Our place is becoming chock-a-block with nasty weapons meant for waging war and
both instructions and examples of a capacity for massive slaughter abound in
the news and online.
Our local government can’t fix all these things, but we can
educate and inform far more sensibly in our ever-evolving population. We can
also learn new values from both our new neighbors and those who were here
before the Europeans ever got involved. And we can do this, as has happened in
our past, without ruining the place with short-sighted machinations that just
fuel all sorts of fires.
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