When teachers strike, students strike. Oppositional defiant attitudes and behaviors are elicited. Scab substitutes become supervisors in an urgent day care center orphanage.
I experienced three strikes during my professional career: 1978, one-day “wildcat strike” (very effective, unannounced surprise); 1980, two days; and 1982, eight days. Much community pressure was placed and focused on the board of education administration, not the teachers.
Game theory is the study of strategic, interactive decision-making among rational (hopefully) individuals. Anytime people are making decisions that affect others or in response to the actions or even the expected actions of others, they’re playing a game.
Recommended readings, research, reflections, and assignments for homework and professional development are the following:
• Getting to Yes and Getting Past No by William Ury, Fisher-Harvard Negotiation Project.
• Negotiate to Win by Jim Hennig.
• The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert Sutton.
• “The Toxic Dozen: 12 Rules for Administrators Who Wish to Subvert Teaching,” Journal of the American Federation of Teachers: Changing Education, Spring 1968.
Hopefully, there is no strike.
David A. Hancock
Chester
Mysteries of Sexuality
Question: What do the following fallible humans probably have in common? As we know, we are all responsible and accountable for our choices, decisions, and end behaviors. You may or may not recognize some of these names from this sample tryst list: Tiger Woods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gen. David Petraeus, Jimmy Dimora, John Edwards, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, David Vitter, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, and Eliot Spitzer.
Possible answer: They are loony lechers and knaves. “I can resist everything except temptation” (Oscar Wilde). “My brain is my second most favorite organ” (Woody Allen). Narcissistic megalomaniacs.
Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide by Maureen Dowd.
Analysis: The seminal perspicacious writings of Sigmund Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Civilization and Its Discontents (and malcontents?) are definitely thought-provoking. Dr. Freud frequently makes the point that we are born between urine and feces, except caesarean sections, in reference to the proximity between the sexual and excretory organs.
Perfunctory sex / coitus is an unsatisfying substitute for masturbation.
Thomas Szasz, MD, in Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary, states, “Traditionally, men used power to gain sex, women, sex to gain power. The new ethic of equality between man and woman must come down to one of two things: either, as the romantics hope, that neither men nor women will use power to gain sex; or, as the realists expect, that both men and women will use power to gain sex, and sex to gain power.”
It took men thousands of years to realize that women are human. It takes only a few decades (for women) to discover/realize that men aren’t!
Also, the uneasy cycle between the sexes seems to be as follows: “Women always fear the men are going to keep them from getting some advantage because of their sex, and men fear that women are going to get some advantage because of their sex.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a magazine interview on his life as a bodybuilder, said, “Having chicks around is the kind of thing that breaks up the intense training. It gives you relief, and then afterward, you go back to the serious stuff.”
Conclusion: What would Dr. Freud think? He might agree with C. M. Meston and D. M. Buss in Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between), which offers an unparalleled exploration of the mysteries underlying women’s sexuality. Using women’s own words, and backed by extensive scientific evidence, the authors delve into the use of sex as a defensive tactic, as a ploy to boost social status, as a barter for household chores, and even as a cure for a migraine headache.
On the tryst list, the spouse of Luv Gov of South Carolina Mark Sanford divorced him, as well as Tiger Woods’s spouse and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s; Judge Susan Webber Wright, who wrote in reference to President Clinton’s tortured definition of his tryst, said, “It appears the president is asserting that Ms. Lewinsky could be having sex with him while, at the same time, he was not having sex with her.”
As John Milton said in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” And Zsa Zsa Gabor in the Observer said, “Personally, I know nothing about sex, because I’ve always been married.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Additions:
• D. J. Trump
• Bill Cosby
(et al)
• Roger Ailes
• Bill O’Reilly
Pedophiles
Peace
War. War. War. The US spends $355 billion a year making war.
That’s $11,000 a second. 1-2-3-4-5. Are we up to your salaries yet?
Of the 22 countries that the US has bombed since the end of WWII—including the long-forgotten raids like Congo (1964), Libya (1986), and Panama (1989)—in how many instances did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result? None. Iraq will be added to the list.
Maybe we should remember some famous quotes. “In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers” (Neville Chamberlain, 1938). “War is the continuation of politics by other means” (Karl Von Clausewitz, 1832).
“Laws are silent in time of war” (Cicero, 106–43 BC). “I’m not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war” (Albert Einstein, 1931).
“There never was a good war, or a bad peace” (Ben Franklin, 1783). “War hath no fury like a noncombatant” (C. E. Montague, 1922). “Little girl … Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come” (The People, Yes [1936] by Carl Sandburg, 1878–1967).
Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? is the title of a 1970 film.
There is no way to peace; peace is the way.
David A. Hancock
Chester Township
USA Has Had Addiction to War From Its First Days
To the editor:
In his State of the Union address, George W. (War) Bush neglected to mention
