Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Sunday, January 04, 2009 12:30:07 PM
I promised my best friend that I would refrain from politics during the 12 days of Christmas, which is not easy for me to do completely. I come from a very political family, in which in many cases your political principles are more or less attained by your ninth birthday. At least mine were -- that was the age at which I worked on my first Presidential campaign. (By the way, I worked for the election of Richard Nixon, and don't expect an apology. I still think he was a better choice than either of his opponents.)
Given the promise I gave, I guess this would be a good time to write of some of life's lessons that I learned from my parents. Some of these have political overtones, but hey -- it's the best this crab can do. (This item concerns lessons learned - often imperfectly - from my father. Mom will get her own item soon.)
My father taught me early on that we, and we alone, are responsible for our own actions. My Dad smoked for over twenty years -- until he was diagnosed with cancer when he was in his late forties. This led him to immediately quit smoking, but it did not lead him to blame the "evil" tobacco for his illness, and it certainly never led him to even consider suing them. To this day, his opinion of the "big tobacco" lawsuits is one of severe contempt. He tells anyone who asks that "We knew back in the '40s that smoking was bad for you. No-one misled us. Anyone who smoked and got ill is responsible for their own illness, and has no (moral) right to sue anybody." You see, my father comes from another, better time. Both of my parents come from the Depression era, and know what adversity and responsibility really mean. A historical parallel would be the immigrants who came to America in the late 1840s and 1850s, who came here to escape the brutal suppression of the pro-democracy rebellions in Europe. These immigrants (many from Germany, Poland, and Ireland) viewed concepts like "freedom" and "liberty" with deadly seriousness, since unlike many of the Americans living at the time, they knew what life was like without them. An Irish rebel, Thomas Meagher, would go on to command the Army of the Potomac's Irish Brigade in the Civil War. Today's Americans are just as ignorant of words like "want" and "poverty" as the native-born Americans of that period were of words like "suppression" were then.
My father also taught me that the concepts of equality before the law and affirmative action are inherently contradictory, and would have been rejected by people like Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. The latter, whom my father greatly respected, wold have spit on affirmative action. My father told me that his reaction would have been along the lines of "I don't want your help; just get out of my way!" Nothing I have read since then about Malcolm X has led me to question my father's judgment.
I also learned from my father the invaluable lesson that most journalists are liberal, and that most of them are liberals first, and journalists second. Throughout Watergate, my father informed his children that President Nixon and his associates had done little or anything that was unprecedented; in fact, many of the so-called "abuses" he and they were accused of had in fact been performed by others against him. For example, after RN graciously declined to dispute the apparently stolen election of 1968 (stolen from Nixon himself, I hasten to add), the ungracious Kennedys responded by having the IRS audit Nixon's tax returns in 1961, 1962, and 1963. Somehow, however, using the IRS against political opponents only became evil when Nixon tried it. Small wonder that the media stayed mute when President Bill Clinton sicced the IRS on a dozen or so conservative think tanks during his Presidency.
My father taught me that marriage vows are unconditional, and that a man never hits a women, except in the incredibly rare situation that he has to to save his own life or that of another. Which virtually never happens. He also taught me that a man who is in the habit of abusing women deserves to forfeit the respect of all decent men, and perhaps forfeit a few teeth as well.
My father taught me the very unClintonian Democratic Party value that a man's word is his bond. He didn't teach me a cliche; he taught me a principle that I have tried to implement in my own life, with some success.
I'm out of break time for now; I'm sure I'll remember more soon.