Chain Of Command

A friend of mine was soliciting my opinion on the current dust-up with Pakistan with the following phrase: "You work for the government, what do you think about it?" First of all, I very much appreciate the elevated level at which my thoughts are seen through that filter. As an public school teacher, I am in fact a member of that not-so-particular group of employees who are part of the great big machine that makes those kind of decisions: foreign policy, federal bailouts, school lunches. I am just a little further down that food chain, however, than Hilary Clinton.
To put my decision making capacity in perspective, the kind of choices I generally get are along the following lines: Do you think you can get the four square balls out of the store room? Yes, I think I can. Not much of a choice, actually. I live in a much more rhetorical world, like when we were trying to figure out where the rug for one of our first grade classes went. I was in on this process from the very beginning. Once the rug was located, another question came up: Who will put it back into the room? That would be me. Then came the trickier issue of trying to figure out how the floor of the first grade room became flooded and caused the rug to be soaked and consequently removed. It was a little like the story of the Little Red Hen. "Not I," said the classroom teacher when asked if she knew about the water being left running. "Not I," said the after school program staff. "Not I," said the night custodian. And so we were left with a mystery that was more in line with the abilities of CSI than elementary school employees.
At the end of the day, there was a clean rug on which the first graders could sit, and the water had been cleaned up so that there was only a clean floor to remind us of what had happened. And that's pretty much how I feel about Pakistan.