The problem with wearing an elephant mask

is not that it means you are a threat or a safety risk, but that someone like Marty Esquivel will try to make it look like it does.

APS School Board President Marty Esquivel is defending himself in federal court against righteous complaints over his disregard of my constitutionally protected human rights to speak freely, to assemble freely, to petition my government for redress of my several grievances, and for due process from the government in its effort to obstruct my efforts.

Esquivel and the other defendants want very badly for someone to believe that he and they have banned me from board meetings, effectively for the rest of my life, because I constitute a realistic threat to his and their personal safety.

There is no real evidence to support their claim.

There are no witness who are not hopelessly conflicted.

Citing as evidence of the threat I present; the wearing of an elephant mask to two school board meetings.

I stood quietly against a back wall.  I made no outward effort to be disruptive; quite the contrary.

On separate occasions APS Director of Communications Rigo Chavez and APS Executive Director of Communications Monica Armenta came to chat with me.  Neither offered any indication that they were at all afraid.

One of them, I can't recall which, came up to me to explain that they had figured out that I was "the elephant in the room."

I wore the elephant mask to those board meetings in an effort to draw attention to the elephant in the room at board meetings; the obvious truth being ignored;

• the abdication of the senior-most role models of the student standards of conduct; 
• the ethics and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS; 
• the relentless pretense of high standards and accountability in the face of overwhelming evidence of their absence.
• In particular the absence of accountability for the senior leadership and role models, to any standards of conduct higher than the law; the lowest standards of conduct.
• a manifest record of lack of accountability even to the law.  Witness the cover up felony criminal misconduct in the leadership of their Praetorian Guard, their publicly funded, private police force.

Marty Esquivel told me in a later meeting, link, he had thought it was a mouse mask.

Whatever else it did, it proved Esquivel and the board weren't going to talk about standards, accountability and role modeling no matter what.

And it proved the Journal was not going to investigate and report upon the ethics and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS, no matter what.

So at least, it wasn't a total waste.




photo Mark Bralley