The news of late, has me thinking a lot about what's happening to the production of wealth and the global redistribution of wealth. I'm worried about who are going to be the winners and who are going to be the losers in this global Super Bowl before this is all done.

This got me to remembering how it's funny how some teachers stand out, among all the teachers a child will have in their education. Such was the lessons of one football coach, who had to substitute for a pregnant teacher on leave, in her Government class. His name was Mr. Gibbs. He was young, handsome, and exotic to our ears because he was from Ireland, in some sort of teacher exchange program.

Now back when I was growing up, we learned about how the production of wealth leads to the conclusion -- that by working for ourselves as individuals is akin to working against one another. I think it might have been one of the public school mantras to insure that the principle of working together was deeply ingrained in us. I'm sure there were flaws in that theory and certainly large areas for debate, but none-the-less, that was what was taught in the California school system.

That semester, we were being taught about the topic of co-operation. The crux of the lessons were that, while it means combined effort, does not mean the loss of individual initiative, enterprise, or effort. If it did, it would be valueless, because it is necessary that the powers of everyone be fully developed. We were taught it would be a bad thing for society if individuals merely worked like cogs in a giant global machine, without knowing why they were at work.

Here's What We Were Taught & Why We Might Have Lost The Super Bowl Of All Super Bowls

The lesson plan all began when Mr. Gibbs stood before our class with a football that he kept tossing up in the air, as he lectured us. Like the other girls in the class, I was both bored and mesmerized by the possibilities -- that what he had to say, might give us a peek into that all male world. Here's the skinny on what he said:

His lesson started with his belief that there is no better way of illustrating the true conception of co-operation than by a football team. As everyone knows, it consists of eleven players. The eleven go into the field to play the game. Of course, you are to play for your side and not for yourself. The game is supposed to be about instinct with fair play.

It is a matter of the combined, or co-operative, effort of eleven individuals, each with brains of his own, powers of his own, and ideas of his own.

How is it done? How is it that each player gets a good game as an individual, while the first principle of the game is to study the interest of one's side and not of oneself?

The answer is, first, that the game has definite rules which each player consents to obey. The rules make the very life of the game. It is because each player obeys the rules that each player gets his pleasure. There would be no pleasure if there were no rules and every player did whatever pleased him at the moment.

Then, too, each member of the eleven, in addition to obeying the general laws, also agrees to obey the captain. This captain places the members of the team in the field according to their individual abilities, and decides the order of the plays. By obedience to these commands, each member of the team gets his best individual chance.

The best results of work are obtained in the same spirit of enlightened self-expression. In mutually directed efforts, individuals can find the most complete satisfaction of their own working powers.

Happiness, as well as fruitfulness in work, follows such co-operation. Doing ones best in a game, the player enjoys not only his own efforts, but the approval and the esteem of his fellow players.

Doing his best in co-operative work, the worker can gain for himself precisely the same individual and social happiness.

Mr. Gibbs' analysis was that, all the varied occupations which are carried on within any country are co-operative so far as they are useful. In the long run, no industry can survive unless it meets the needs of a number of people sufficient to sustain it. Whether a man sees or not that his industry is really a servant of those who are its customers, it is nevertheless true that it is part of a scheme of service.

It is curiously true that sometimes a man who imagines himself to be a selfish creature, who thinks of nothing else but looking after, as many would say, "Number One," is really working hard all day and all the year to serve others, and thus leaving himself very little leisure in which to do anything for himself.

Now Mr. Gibbs taught us that in his view, that fortunately, people were becoming more and more conscious of the mutuality of work -- of how one occupation is dove-tailed with another, of how industries depend on one another, and how necessary it is for all the individuals working in an industry to have harmonious relations.

Part of the lesson, was for us to see the possibility that managers of industries would soon be working together in trade associations or unions -- which had central offices and meeting places as part of some grand plan to discuss from time-to-time the progress of the industry -- how to make improvements in their products or its methods, and how best the general interest of the whole of the members can be served by individual action, just as in the game of football.

He wanted us to also see how workers in some industries are drawn together in unions or trade societies, which were formed to help the workers. He was certain that as time went on that there would be more of those unions. He felt that whether it knows it or not, any industry is merely a public servant, and the more it is conscious of the fact, the better for it and for a nation.

He thought such organization would prevent disputes by helping workers to understand one another. He wanted us to believe that every industry should see that it is part of a working whole, and that if one industry fails, or stops work -- it injures all other industries.

Well, Mr. Gibb was a dreamer who dreamed big. He concluded his lecture talking about how each working section of the nation might someday come to understand and appreciate the others. His ideas were, like the times, a warm and fuzzy viewpoint -- intended to inspire children to grow up to want to take part in the serious business of life and to understand what a beautiful dream of a great nation working together is. He wanted us to make things better, happier, and be more fruitful than generations in the past.

More importantly, he wanted us to know that it is not alone in our own country that we should consider this important principle of co-operation. He taught us about how World War I and World War II both showed that what is true of trade inside a country -- is also true of trade of the world as a whole. Mind you, that was back at the beginning of the Vietnam war for Americans.

He talked about how with each war, we become poorer, and how victory for even the winners made us losers and worse off. Mr. Gibbs firmly held the opinion that every country in the world is worse off after, than before the beginning of any great conflict. The victors are suffering as well as the vanquished. Old trade connections were broken. Men in different countries ceased to have faith in each other's power to meet their bills. Traders no longer believed in each other's credit. So a large part of the trade by which the world lived disappeared, and all the world became poorer -- whether they participated in the wars or not.

He offered out to us the notion that world-trade is in essence just as much a scheme of cooperation, as is trade within our own borders. He summed up his lesson in pointing out that we are more than mere cogs in a global machine.  That was pretty heavy stuff for a bunch of kids to digest.

If we go back for no more than three hundred years, we have a picture of a world each part of which was largely self-contained. Not very much trade was done then, even within a country. Each little locality lived mainly upon itself.

As a consequence, the average man could exchange his work only for that of a few people who lived about him. That meant that his work had quite a limited value to him. He could not, for example, exchange work, as easily as we can, for bananas from South America, or for electronics made cheaply in China. He was largely confined to the consumption of those things which either the natural fertility of local soil, or native skill of his neighbors could supply. However hard he worked, the results of his work were strictly limited in character.

How different is the lot of the civilized worker of today, who, by reason of the accomplishments of global commerce, which rest essentially upon the wonderful work of the modern world -- can exchange his work for a variety of articles as could not be commanded even by the richest men three hundred years ago! We can get for a small sum of money, a tropical fruit of which kinds had not even been tasted in 1750. Even in these troubled financial times, the poorest in many countries can enjoy dozens of things, which the richest man on earth did not have back then when we weren't such a global world.

Even back in the early 1960s, I don't think that Mr. Gibbs or any of us could have imagined the world that we now have. We didn't have the Internet, it wasn't the global world in the same sense that we have now. Right now our world is undergoing perhaps the greatest redistribution of wealth and services on global proportions.

There are going to be winners and there are going to be losers. We can no longer exist as a great nation without the supplies we receive from around the globe. Without others in other countries, we would be without many foods and raw materials, which are the food of work. An account of our imports, is really an account of the services which the world performs for us. An account of our exports, is really an account of the services we perform for the world. The two acts balance each other, and that is an expression of the kind of co-operation that we need to foster today.

The progress of the world has arisen from the extension of commerical relations. It is by no means a thing to deplore, that different nations have different natural resources and that thier peoples have varying attributes. It is the very variety of different lands and different peoples which gives savor to humanity and interest to the intelligent man who surveys the globe.

I can't help but wonder what would Mr. Gibbs say about this current state of affairs -- a world so shaky, where so many have worked hard all their lives to lose part or all of what they worked so hard for.

Would he be as disillusioned as my husband, a retired railroad worker, who was a loyal union man for forty years in the same job? Would they agree that benefits they were promised were, but empty promises? Would Mr. Gibbs still think that we only needed one cure for all that's wrong -- just everyone working together in cooperation in the same spirit of a football team, in the greatest Super Bowl game ever of winners and losers?

I have no answers, and am not even sure what to think, but I do know this -- a whole lot of us need to be cooperating in exchanging thoughts and ideas and come up with solutions to the problems we are all facing in this world together -- before it's too late.