The very worst people in your life

In over 50 years of teaching in higher education, I sometimes would delve into a personal mood with my students and take 10 minutes a term to give them what I thought was eminently valuable advice on criteria for choosing trusted friends and acquaintances – and lovers.

Most prominent among these lecturettes was my speaking on “sneaks.”

Among the worst people I know are those who — and I partially owe this focus to my saintly father-in-law — are sneaks.

I was thinking about this as I had a good exchange with my friend, Marc Steiner, with whom I had many political disagreements but whom I always found to be an eminently decent, fair and challenging interlocutor.

Everyone knows what a sneak is: a person who lacks the intestinal and intellectual fortitude to confront someone for whose views they have contempt, but are perfectly willing to attack and hurt behind their backs-and only behind their backs.

Being politically active and the man who was the longest serving member of the Towson University Senate, I have made a small number of adversaries at work. But none of them (to my knowledge) was a sneak until my final 3 years of serving.

The exact opposite of sneakiness, you may be surprised to hear from an active conservative-is the great Towson University Administration, including the President and Provost and Vice Presidents — Brian DeFilippis (what a great administrator is he) — three people whom I tremendously admire — and there are others.

When I got into an ugly fight 3-plus years ago on the issue of my advising Towson’s Charlie Kirk group, Turning Point, and worked successfully to rid the group of some badly behaving members, but I wouldn’t quit as advisor-it energized a few atypical Towson pseudo-professors and pseudo-intellectuals to oppose me and Turning Point with all of their misspent energy.

I have few enemies at Towson, mostly a university with the best and brightest. But my feelings toward them would not be a surprise to any of them.

When I have discussed my “sneaks” theory with friends and large groups, invariably their eyes light up. They have stories about people in their own families, at school, at work and in biographies who have struck them as “sneaks.”

There are sneaks in comedic drama…perhaps the most well-known is Eddie Haskell in the old venerated sitcom, “Leave it to Beaver.” He would parade his inauthenticity in front of the family of his friends. But it was so grossly fake that the audience could just laugh at it; “Hello, Mrs. Cleaver; what a wonderful dinner this is,” before confiding to friend Wally how it made him gag. Humor, that…he spent his working real-life honorably serving in a police department, respected by all.

In real life, the consistently disingenuous sneaks work to do nothing but exploit people to enhance their own lives.

The sneaky polity du jour is Iran, which denies having negotiated with Trump leadership and Americans…Trump says they have negotiated consistently.

Disagreement on space-time events: negotiations.

On whose truth would you bet?

Note to all of my students and victims of sneaks everywhere, in family, at work, nationally and internationally:

Sneaks — we can do without them.