IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

The current and ongoing massacre of completely innocent men, women and children in Syria is so frighteningly familiar.

And so is the refusal of the watching world to intervene.

How many times in the last 100 years have we seen this disregard for "others?"

I am not expecting or demanding that the Unites States be all things for all people, but I would be considerably cheered if the United Nations were something more than a billion dollar a year cocktail party at Tavern on the Green.

How darling it must be to land a UN assignment and be shipped off to the horrors of one of the great food and drink and entrainment and literary and artistic cities in the world...knowing all the while that children are being slaughtered in some dark cupboard of the world by the latest power mad devil.

What was it about Hitler that we didn't get?

Strike,,,OUT!

A friend of mine told me the other day about the two strikes her husband has experienced.

In the first instance, he was a young man living in an eastern European country where he was born. During that strike, he and his colleagues froze and starved, or something perilously darn close.

In the current strike, as a teacher working in British Columbia public schools, he laughed about the two hours he might put in while sucking on his tall nonfat caramel macchiato.

Then, he's going skiing.

This man, like so many teachers that I have met over the years, not only doesn't agree with his union, the always pugilistic rabble-rousing BCTF, but he feesl intimidated by the union.


Here's my problem.


Maybe teaching and teachers have experienced a dramatic upturn in quality in the past several generations. Or maybe they just talk a better game about how wonderful and dedicated and hard-working and caring they are.

From all the 11 years I  attended public schools in Canada, I can remember not more than three really good teachers. All the rest were downright lazy, ignorant, thoughtless and often cruel slackers who shouldn't have been allowed within 50 yards of a young person.

So...my sympathies, so often on the side of union workers, are less than non-existent for the teachers in their annual strike. Show me a year when they weren't pulling this stunt.

THE POVERTY LINE

JOIN THE 43 MILLION - NOT TO BE MISSED

FROM DR. BRIAN DAY - A LAFF RIOT