External enemies.

Who is the external enemy of the teachers? Parents. Who are the internal allies of the teachers? The school board, administrators, anyone who can pay them when they are suspended or anyone who can help them keep their jobs while being sued.

Now replace “teacher’s union” and “teachers” with police unions, SEIU thug unionistas, IRS union workers, TSA union workers, and you now have a small picture of how they do it.

For the police, it’s thugs and Democrat backed crooks and liars that are the external enemy. Give money and power to the Democrat police chiefs and mayors and union bosses, they will protect you when they sue you for excess force in capping that blackie, so says the Left.

The point is, the Leftist alliance is instigating both groups. They are the supporters and allies of both groups. They benefit from both groups fighting.

This is the nature of “class warfare”. This is how a nation is brought down by internal dissidents and traitors.

My local school is a “school of choice,” which means a lot of our students come from other districts. One of our selling points is that we’re safe (not to mention the majority of the staff, from cooks to teachers live here instead of being commuters who consider it just a job). There have been a few touchy safety issues that I know of, but mostly for things like concussions occurring during football games, but the biggest brouhaha was when some well-meaning person brought tiny squirtguns to school for a class that was having a fun outside event (I think it was the French vs. Spanish Cinco de Mayo soccer game).

Again, it wasn’t the students or the teachers; it was a parent who thought that giving 2-inch “guns” shaped like rayguns and spaceships to a bunch of teenaged boys showed a lack of concern for safety issues. (Nevermind that ALL the kids put them away on the bus, just as they promised, and didn’t take them out until they got home.) Plus they were shaped like rayGUNS and that was the equivalent of taking them to the firing range. Luckily all the administrators did was meet with the parents and then give a synopsis to the staff involved.

So the people getting upset aren’t always who you think they are. (And I’m not even going into the Navy vet who refuses to let his children stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because it’s “Communist indoctrination.” Sheesh.)

I’m grateful every day that I was a kid in the 1950’s when boys could be boys. If we’d gone on a hayride together, I’d have protected you.

http://patrickhenryprentice.blogspot.com/2013/06/boys-and-guns.html

This struck a powerful chord with me because, as a child in the late ’50s-early ’60s, I was all too familiar with the original version. I routinely heard it from adults to whom I complained that somebody had teased me: “Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will NEVER hurt you.” Oh, how this used to enrage me. First of all, it was demonstrably false. Of course words did sometimes hurt, and the pain didn’t go away just because grownups pretended it wasn’t there. Plus, it seemed so uncaring to be dismissed with useless — and newly hurtful — words rather than comforted or helped with the teasing.

However, in thinking about this new version reported by Paul in Boston, I realize that although I didn’t consciously perceive it at the time, there was a powerful message of help and comfort embodied in the old version of the saying. The adults who I thought didn’t care were in fact telling me that they cared enough to have faith in me to be stronger than mere mean words. I was being taught, like it or not (and I certainly didn’t!) that I had the inner resources to handle this problem on my own, without help from an outside authority. And of course, that did turn out to be true. (It may not be a coincidence that later on I became a lawyer and writer, using words as my tools and my weapons. And it certainly isn’t a coincidence that I turned one of my childhood tormentors into a character in a children’s story, using her real first name, and wrote her a well-deserved comeuppance. Hah!)

Think of the difference for today’s children. This new version of the old saying teaches them, not that adults believe that they are strong and can rely upon their own inner resources to cope with adversity, but that they are entirely helpless in the face of inevitable harm – not only at risk from sticks and stones but “surely” destined to be hurt by words. This saying instructs kids that they are defenseless victims, so lacking in inner strength that they must look outside themselves for help. Further, they’re being taught that nothing is more dangerous than words. Worse than sticks and stones, certain to cause harm, words must be stopped — and only all-powerful authority can do it.

Tie that to the throttling of free speech that’s been going on across the culture, from the Citizens United brouhaha to IRS efforts to stifle the Tea Party to campus hate-speech codes, the criminalization of “offensive” speech, the efforts to silence Fox News (you should see the bumper sticker my liberal brother has on his car on this topic), the stunned outrage of liberals at a dinner party who hear unimaginable words of dissent spoken by some previously-closeted conservative soon-to-be-ex-friend . . . well, for years now, this blog has been cataloguing the left’s determined efforts to silence and destroy any and all words of dissent. (How often did Obama, in his first few years in office, say about one group of critics or another, “It’s time for them to stop talking”?) And now look what our children are being taught about the inherent dangerousness of words and the relationship between that danger and authority.

Yes, of course I’m reading far too much into a poster on some wall in some elementary school somewhere. Or am I?

Teach your children (grandchildren) to be responsible citizens. Teach them the concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Teach them government is a dangerous force that easily goes astray. Teach them to trust family, friends, and neighbors; and distrust the motivations government at any level.

As a kid I was never allowed to play with toy guns. My parents thought it was a dangerous idea.