Gil Spencer is a Hyde Park resident and member of the Enquirer Board of Contributors.The lesson in week three of my Business Concepts Learned from Having Kids blog series is all about learning to get along with each other. So we will be doing that soon.Īvoid working for people who won’t have your back. Do your best to stand up to cowards, tattletales and bullies. And last, but not least, don’t be too surprised that when you stand up to one, they turn out to be better people than you thought. I included my phone number and invited him to call me if he wanted to discuss the issue like grown-ups.Īnd guess what? He did. I also let him know how lame I thought it was that he would act like a 12-year-old trying to get a classmate in trouble and sent to the principal’s office. I wrote the guy back informing him that what I write for The Enquirer I write on my own time and it has nothing to do with my day job. In it, he complained about my awful and insensitive opinions and how I, as an employee of the company, ought not to express such horrid views.Ĭlearly, this guy – a college professor no less – was trying to get me in trouble with my boss with the goal of getting him to shut me up. But instead of writing a letter to the editor, or a note to me personally, he wrote a letter to the head of the corporation I work for. He didn’t like a column I had written and felt the need to respond. Recently, a reader of this newspaper tried to tattle on me. That that person shares the same sense of right and wrong, what’s “acceptable” and what’s not. Tattlers must be smart enough to know that their story will be of interest to the person they are tattling to. And as noted above, it matters a lot what they are tattling about. When it comes to squealers it can hard to know when they are telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But nobody loves one more than a journalist. They also tattle out of righteous anger and of a pristine sense of their own moral superiority. They tattle out of envy, out of fear, out of vindictiveness. They tattle for profit, for stature, for political advantage. They tattle for a variety of reasons, some good but many bad. Today’s tattletales range from corporate whistleblowers to White House leakers to discarded sex partners. “Nobody likes a tattletale,” was the lesson your mother was trying to teach you. It used to be if you snitched on your sister for taking an unauthorized cookie, your mother would spank her. Some of us are old enough to remember when being a tattletale was a bad thing. It’s quite another to whine to the nearest grown-up that Jimmy told a joke in the lunchroom that “hurt” your feelings. It is one thing to rat out a drug dealer who’s selling poison to school kids. Something has gone wrong in our society when a kid thinks he can and should get a teacher in trouble for making an off-hand joke. So what’s the lesson the rest of us can take from this story? I say it is that we have become a nation of tattletales. Readers of The Enquirer will certainly be relieved to hear it. The good news, according to the district spokesperson, is that the teacher in question, “has taken the proper steps to grow as a person and a professional.”
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