In The Staff Room

Yes, I am happy that no one is recording the conversations that take place in our staff room. At lunch or at the end of a long day of teaching four-to-twelve year olds, the talk sometimes runs a little south of the loving and supportive. The blank stares we sometimes receive after asking students to retrieve their reading books. The number of times we repeat the simplest of instructions. The fistfights that erupt because of a four-square game. It is nice to have a place where we can go, as professionals, and have a purely non-professional moment. This is so we can return the next day to experience a similar experience. With the hope and expectation that it will get easier to manage or cope with internally. 
That being said, I am left wondering why the "president" would hold a rally with invited guests and media to make the following pronouncement: "Sometimes you have to let them fight. It's like two kids in a lot, you got to let them fight and then you pull them apart." This was not a referendum proposed by his lightly qualified Secretary of Education, but rather a metaphor used to describe the Turkish invasion of Syria. Leaving aside for the moment that most kids in a lot fail to show up with automatic weapons and rocket launchers, and that hundreds of thousands of non-combatants are in the line of fire when this little tussle broke out, it still brings the "president's" parenting strategies into question. 
I might say something in the staff room about "Lord of the Flies," but once I walk out onto the playground, I am there to keep kids safe. Not just the bystanders, but the two taking wild swings at one another over a soccer ball. I am there to keep the peace, and as difficult as I find it to do at times, I try and to rise above the fray. 
Should I expect as much from the "president?" 
I know, there are plenty of those in the other bubble who will hoot and laugh derisively as these words are spoken. Fists are raised and cries of assent are hollered. "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out." And again, if this were behind closed doors and the discussion fell to the desperation of the situation in the Middle East, it might be understood. But once the doors fly open and the lights come on and the microphones are turned on, the whole world is watching. Which puts me in mind of a book I read in school, All Quiet On The Western Front: “Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.”
I know. It's a book, and I have high expectations of anyone picking it up and reading it. But I can hope. That's because I'm a teacher.