The postal service is unable to legally strike. They struck in the 70s (?) illegally and got tons of concessions and no one went to prison for it. Seems like teachers could do something similar. We wouldn’t miss cops and, unfortunately, firefighters also wouldn’t be missed (we still love them, unlike cops).

Yeah. The dude that came up with the term cognitive dissonance described this process in his book When Prophesy Fails. Basically when you are in a cult and your doomsday ends up being a normal day you have a freak out of cognitive dissonance. This isn’t great because people don’t like having their strongly held beliefs shown to be invalid. So they must come up with a post hoc rationalization as to why their doomsday didn’t come true and why they are still right.