Oh, John, We Hardly Knew Ye

John Kasich is really making me angry with all his talk of how public employees are ripping off their fellow Ohioans.  As far as I am concerned, the only public employee who is ripping off the Ohioans is John Kasich.
I am a retired teacher.  I paid toward my retirement and my employer matched it.  A lot of workers have that.  I paid for my health insurance the entire time also.  So do all my fellow teachers, retired and working.  We are not the enemy.
Kasich is able to skew things so that public employees seem to be better off than the middle class.  John boy, we ARE the middle class.
 Without us, you wouldn't have public services to offer.  You would have to educate your children, fight your own fires and protect your family yourself.  Let's just take educating your kids.  First, you have to stay home so you can't have a job unless it is at night when the kids are sleeping and who will protect them then?
You have to be able to think on your feet and develop a curriculum for your kids and choose the books they read.  You also have to teach them social skills so you would have to get together with some other kids at some point or another.  If your kid gets sick during lesson time, you have to stop and care for him or her while the other kids just wait.
Now, there are people out there that home school their children but they are supported by the Dept. of Education in Ohio so that they don't have to develop lesson plans or curriculum.  I admire those people and hope the best for their kids but to me there is nothing like an education with a diverse group of children your own age.
Teachers work hard.  Are there some who work the system? Probably, but I don't know any of them. When I worked, I worked hard and dedicated most of my time and a lot of my  own money educating kids.  So did my colleagues.  We kept studying ways to help kids learn better.  We tried adventurous ideas to help kids get along and learn to work in a group.  We taught kids to respect others and recognize their strengths and the strengths of others.
And now our Governor says I am a cheater and so are my colleagues.  How dare you sit in Columbus and judge what we do?  Come to Cleveland and teach--you wouldn't last an hour.  Try fighting a fire or arresting someone or nursing someone back to health...you would fail miserably.
It seems the governor skews the rhetoric in this direction so you all won't notice that he is taking away our legal right to collective bargaining.  No more give and take about class size or how many ambulances for EMTs or how many patients a nurse should serve. 
If we lose that right, then you are next...that's right Ohio, you are next.
If people had known that Kasich was going to go this route before the election, I wonder if he would have won?   I know my vote didn't put him there.  I hope yours didn't either.