[Mpls] "But How Are the Children": a Minneapolis Weekend...

[Dyna Sluyter]

	Greetings from the war zone.

	I had trouble staying awake at the DFL city convention but caught the 
important details. This was thanks to the rapid succession of gunshots 
and assorted bumps in the night that kept me up past 3 am the night 
before. Most discomforting to know that someone in the neighborhood has 
full auto firearms.

	The button seen at the convention, "But How Are the Children", is most 
relevant to the choice of our next school board. Thankfully the 
Republican State Education Commissioner who would starve Minneapolis 
students to fund unneeded advanced classes for the geniuses in her 
favorite wealthy suburb is gone. But her party is still in power, and 
they drool over the prospect of Minneapolis Public School's bankruptcy.

	Given that prospect and the steadily deteriorating demographics of 
Minneapolis' schools it is amazing that we had no less than 7 so well 
qualified candidates for 3 School Board seats. I'll skip the previously 
reported details, but it was no surprise that Peggy Flanagan and Lydia 
Lee won endorsement on the first ballot. After 3 ballots we had 2 
candidates left nearly tied and one graciously dropped out. Rightfully 
that last standing candidate would have been endorsed by acclamation. 
But that most qualified gentleman was a Somali immigrant. Let the 
record show that it was not the DFL party but one delegate that raced 
to the microphone and demanded a quorum count. That delegate through 
ignorance or bigotry denied our Minneapolis DFL the opportunity to 
endorse our first Somali candidate. Being just sort of a quorum we 
adjourned and I headed home, to be denied sleep again by the neighbor 
kids playing basketball. The usual beat up toy hoop was as usual 
sitting on and killing my boulevard grass, though I retrieved my 
landscaping blocks from it the other day. When I heard the sound of a 
firecracker or cap gun I sprang to the window to check. Noting my 
observation one of these pre teen boys removed from his pants and 
displayed a gun. Noting it's huge size and the fact that he was holding 
it by the tips of two fingers I remained unimpressed, and he seemed 
displeased by my response and restored it to his baggy pants pocket.

	Now outside of basketball these babybanger's amusements are things 
like throwing their bikes at concrete walls and such. Given that said 
bikes don't fit them I doubt they paid for them anyway. I have yet to 
see them at the school bus stop. Strangely the adults in the household 
are relatively peaceable folks, but perhaps they're well medicated. 
They have a goodly collection of dead cars in the yard, and those in 
the street don't look like they'd make it far.

	Not wanting to be an eyewitness for the "police shoot child with toy 
gun" headline story on the 10 o'clock news I didn't call 911. A bit of 
research later on the web, Fleet Farm,  and the photo ads in "Shotgun 
News" (porny for gun nuts) pretty much confirmed my suspicion that the 
gun was a fake. The closest thing I found to it was an air pistol... 
although a "1911" type pistol with the longest possible barrel and 
slide with a mahogony handle insert looks vaguely like it. The kid who 
pulled it is probably 12 and already halfway through his short life of 
a gangbanger.

	Today the shots rang out a few blocks north, and they were fatal. 
Taken from us was one of the proprieters of a family business that has 
persevered in the gang free fire zone around Lowry and Lyndale, an area 
now almost totally devoid of legal business activity. The murderer is 
still at large, and our understaffed police force will soon be 
distracted by new murder and mayhem. Then again, our understaffed jail 
is full and half of what we used to hopefully call our "reform schools" 
are closed.

	I'll keep the copy of "Shotgun News" for future use as a weapons ID 
reference... But the ads are starting to look tempting.

		hanging on in Hawthorne,

			Dyna Sluyter