My father was a public servant for most of his working life. After high school, he entered the Air Force and became an airman on a giant cargo plane; following his hitch, he went on to train as a teacher.  A small-town boy from a poor depression-era Texas Panhandle family, Dad has a Master's degree in Biology, and an All-But-Dissertation PhD.

Rather than use his degrees to make good corporate money, my father used them in service of others' children. For over thirty years, Dad taught high school in Oklahoma.  He taught biology, earth science, even psychology in later years: if he was needed to teach a subject, he took on the necessary learning himself, over his summers and his weekends, and he taught it.

For literally generations of teens, he was biology club sponsor, football coach, student government mentor - you name it. Twenty-somethings used to come running up to us in the mall, towing their own small children, to show them off to my father and to thank him.

Dad was one of the "nice" teachers at our school.  But nice though he was, Dad took his job seriously. A former high school football coach in a town where sports were extremely important, he refused to give an undeserved passing grade to the football star who was failing his class so that he could play in the big game, even under pressure from the school Administration. Dad cared about that young man and wanted him to succeed in more than just sports.

I remember Dad sitting for hours most nights in his orange and brown plaid recliner - it was the 70's - grading papers. It was very clear in our house that teaching was not an 8:00 am to 3:30 pm job. Proper planning, grading and evaluating took up at least 8-12 "home" hours every week.

In his early sixties, Dad got sick: the heart attack that literally knocked him off his feet in his beloved class room caused him to be exiled from it for good. Thank God for his pension and post-retirement medical benefits. He and my mom have been able to live very frugally for the past twenty years on his pension.

A lot of very loud voices now are claiming that public sector workers like my dad don't deserve decent benefits - that my father's pension was unearned, an extravagance, a waste. More importantly for the futures of upcoming generations of school kids, these so-called deficit reducers would take away pensions and benefits from teachers yet to be educated and hired.

People who choose teaching as a career give up a lot of money and career mobility in return for stability and good benefits, as well as for the pure joy of teaching. In all of his long career, my father never made more money than half of what I was making in the business world just a few years out of college.

Right now, teaching isn't the only vital public sector job where benefits and pay are under attack. Police, fire-fighters, the people who inspect our food, the people who monitor public health: all are under siege. The media is feeding a narrative that these lazy, undeserving, under-achieving public leeches are stealing our tax-payer money. Somehow, the implication is that, because these people make a living wage and have decent benefits, everyone else is losing something.

It is beyond me how American employees can possibly accept that version of the situation. American employees should be pointing to the benefits and pay of the public sector as a goal for private industry to live up to, not as something to be reduced down, until no one has more or is paid more than a checker at Wal-Mart.

I just hope that, as a society, we leave sufficient incentive structure in place so that future generations of fathers can make a decision for public service.