Palm Beach Florida Weekly

COMMENTARY

The patriot vote



 

 

So a South African woman named Sonya Lubner shows up in the United States with her husband, Clive, they become Americans, they open a business on the southwest coast and they raise some whippersnappers, educating them in the region’s fine schools.

They even fly American flags on July 4 until her children become adults.

So far so good.

And then last week she writes a letter to the local paper about a referendum on the Lee County ballot, a thing that popped up like a prairie dog both on the early voting ballot and the ballot voters will see next week, on Nov. 8.

Apparently some patriots in good ol’ Lee — actually one patriot, a lawyer and Republican state representative from District 78 named Jenna Persons-Mulicka, supported by some other patriots — want the superintendent of schools to be elected rather than appointed like he or she was before 1974, when voters decided maybe that wasn’t the best approach.

Sounds like a fine American standard, doesn’t it? It did to Rep. Persons-Mulicka, so she sponsored a bill in the House to put the proposal on the ballot, where it now stands proudly.

In 40 other Florida counties, school board members, who are themselves elected and paid something — 50 cents or a dollar, probably — appoint their superintendents. Maybe they’re all throwback communists who don’t believe in democracy, and maybe that’s the case in 48 of our 50 United (more or less, lately less) States.

Alabama and Florida, apparently, are the only two states that still allow superintendents of school boards to be elected. That’s a choice most counties in Florida don’t make. I can’t speak for Alabama — nobody has ever been able to speak for Alabama except George Wallace and Lynyrd Skynyrd — but Florida?

Listen, pal, this is Ron DeSantis country, home of the 47th president, she hopes, which is why Rep. Persons-Mulicka not only sponsored this bill, but she sponsored another bill our governor championed banning abortions after 15 weeks. And she threw her support 100% behind the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” and “Anti-Woke” legislation that require teachers to sidestep history in the classroom. Unless they want to get fired.

Look, we enslaved a few people for 2 ½ centuries, then lynched more than 4,000 more of them after that, between about 1880 and 1960, and we also tried a genocidal extermination of a few natives who wore feathers in their hair, here and there. So what? We’re really a bunch of nice guys, nowadays. So get over it, right?

And let’s ELECT a school superintendent here in Lee or anywhere else who is not only over it, but who will wholeheartedly support the governor and Rep. Persons-Mulicka.

What do they do in other counties?

They don’t do elections for superintendents in Miami-Dade, for example, the biggest district in the state and the fourth largest in the U.S. behind New York, L.A. and Chicago.

That district includes 334,000 little knuckleheads attending 516 schools in a system with a budget of about $7 billion.

And what about paltry Palm Beach County, where just over 187,000 little knuckleheads attend 236 schools, which have a budget of just under $5 billion? Same.

Lee, poor little thing, comes in at about 99,000 students in 118 schools, a place where superintendents managing the budgets, now $2 billion-plus, have traditionally been picked from pools of people with vast experience in flying a public education aer-o-plane.

These people can also navigate emergencies like pandemics and hurricanes and evangelicals who want prayer in public schools — their prayer.

But that’s anti-democratic, appointing talent to fit the job as superintendent. Our democratic patriots have realized this is wrong. They want an election, by God!

Let me share the letter Ms. Lubner presented, which that dang bastion of lefties, the daily newspaper, printed as an editorial opinion.

“With early voting in progress, please take note of the last item on your ballot, the referendum,” she wrote. “It’s confusing, but know this: Current superintendent of schools, Dr. Bernier, who is leading a cogent, coordinated response to Hurricane Ian, was appointed, after a nationwide search of qualified applicants. If an inexperienced, elected person had been in the position, one shudders to imagine.

“Simply put, appointing a superintendent is administrative; electing a superintendent is political. Stop politicizing education. VOTE NO.”

Here’s an obvious fact: When Winston Churchill once allegedly said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” he clearly had not met Ms. Lubner.

She is nevertheless very average in a number of ways.

For one thing — and I happen to know she and Clive travel a lot both by plane and ship — she is adamantly opposed to democracy aboard aircraft or cruise ships, like the average voter.

There’s probably no excuse for it, but it’s true.

Everything about her suggests she will resist the right of the people to elect their leaders when it comes to captains or pilots on ships or planes she boards.

If the Lubners embark on an Airbus A380, for example — the wide-body, fulllength, double-deck flying machine with a maximum seating capacity of 853, a takeoff weight of 573 tons and a speed of more than 750 mph — it will not be one where democracy reigns.

In Ms. Lubner’s opinion, a woman does not have the right to choose. And neither does a man or an alien, if that’s not too frequently redundant.

Experts must choose the pilots of machines with 1,000 buttons and blinking lights carrying 853 passengers and three pilots with 21 crew members.

There’s no reasoning with her. That’s just how she sees it.

And she doesn’t want the pilot of her public school system elected, either. ¦

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *