My father would have voted for Trump

Last year, I retired after several years of seriously planning for it. We had help from an advisor, and we worked with a legal and financial framework that had essentially been in place for the last 15 years.

Then, late last fall, Congress passed and President Obama signed the compromise budget bill, which was considered a great step forward in intra-governmental relations. Embedded in the bill, and no one will admit who did it or even if congressional leaders were aware of it, was a provision that changed some Social Security provisions. It was a change desired by the Obama Administration for years. What it effectively did was save the government $11 billion annually in Social Security costs.

Guess who is helping to pay for that? People like me. It’s coming out of the hide of the middle class. It was one of the assumptions of our retirement planning. And now it’s gone, with no one wanting to own up who did it.

Guess who isn’t paying for it? The Congress who passed it, the President who wanted it, and the congressional staff people who slipped it into the legislation. They’re not covered by Social Security. They can make policy decisions without any thought of the impact on themselves, because there isn’t any (unless their constituents get riled enough to evict them from office).

They are what columnist and author Peggy Noonan calls the “protected class.” My wife and I are  members of the unprotected class, although our saving and spending habits over the course of our marriage probably make us more protected than many. Our financial planner had to do some scrambling for us and their other clients, because this hit with a wallop and it hit suddenly.

This reminds me of my father. He had more experiences than you might imagine of dealing with unexpected changes in laws. He was a small businessman who often found himself operating on the basis of negative cash flow, which you can do for a time but ultimately not sustain. Federal, state, and local tax laws changed constantly. Adding insult to injury was the constant harassment by local police in New Orleans looking for “considerations” so he could avoid having his delivery truck constantly ticketed.

A member of the World War II generation, he was often bewildered by what passed for political wisdom. He voted Democratic in state and local elections (there was no real Republican Party in Louisiana until the late 1970s and early 1980s) and Republican in national elections. He was conservative. He believed in law and order. He didn’t trust the national Democrats. He liked Richard Nixon (until Watergate) and he loved Spiro Agnew (until he was indicted). He particularly liked Agnew because the Vice President would publicly say things – like against the news media – that outraged the media, liberals, and progressives. And he voted for Ronald Reagan twice.

My father struggled in business as he watched big corporations and big banks get benefit after benefit from the federal government, including from some of the very same people he had supported. He watched privileges and special considerations be conferred upon people whom he believed didn’t deserve them. And he would have understood the concern many people have about illegal immigrants – and he would have seen them as ways for big corporations (and big agriculture) to manage labor costs.

If he were still alive today, my father would be supporting Donald Trump.

And my father and I, who tended to vote for generally the same national candidates, would have parted political ways.

Of the remaining candidates in the race, the one who speaks to my heart is Ben Carson.

I have friends on Facebook who say that you can’t be a true Christian and vote for Donald Trump. I understand their anxiety, but I don’t place my hope in political candidates, or place my hope against them. If Trump wins the Republican nomination, and Hilary Clinton the Democratic nomination, I will be completely perplexed on how to vote.

But my faith remains intact, regardless of who runs, regardless of who wins. Nothing else in this life is certain.

Top photograph by Peter Griffin, and lower photograph by Kai Stachowiak, both via Public Domain Pictures (second photo here).  Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads: A Father's Speech

Of all the things I read and saw online this week, nothing quite affected me like this video of a father giving his daughter away at her wedding. It is simple and straightforward, like, I suspect, the man who made it. It’s heartfelt and funny, but underscored with a serious love. Be prepared to shed a tear (along with the groom).

He taught me two things about fatherhood

He arrived two weeks after his due date, by induction, and he was not impressed, yelling his way out into the world. He was a big baby – at birth he looked like he was three months old, pushing toward 10 pounds. The nurse cleaned him up, wrapped him in a little blanket, and put him in my arms. Eyes in a little round face squinted at me.

I fell in love.

At seven months, sitting between us in his car seat, he tried to take control of the steering wheel. We were on the interstate.

He walked at nine months. He walked for exactly one day. Then he ran and didn’t stop.

At two, he climbed into the car in the garage, keys in hand. He considered himself an adult, so why shouldn’t he drive the car?

He was four, perhaps five, when I noticed something odd about the training wheels on his bike. He wasn’t using them. I took them off, and off he went. When his mother saw him, she burst into tears.

For the elderly neighbor across the street, he was her Jeopardy partner. They’d watch the television show together, and she’d give him snacks.

Early one Saturday morning, we heard the television set on. I stumbled into the den to see what was up, and there he was, watching a golf game on television. Golf. He was five.

And then time begins to run together. I’m not sure what happened, but a lot of time passed between the little boy singing at the top of his lungs for a church Christmas program and a white stretch limousine pulling into the driveway for the senior prom. In between were hundreds if not thousands of soccer games, basketball games, baseball games, and any other kind of game with a ball.

Like that 1987 World Series game, Cardinals and the Twins playing game 5 in Old Busch Stadium. We were there. He explained the game to me.

College, and then his first job, working for a minor league baseball team. And then the jump to Arizona. Watching him load the U-Haul truck. Watching him drive away.

Even good things for your children can be hard.

And then he finds Stephanie in Phoenix. We fly out one Christmas to meet her and her family. She was scared to death. Turns out he had told her all kinds of stories about his mother.

Almost two years later, we flew out again to Phoenix. For their wedding.

And then my St. Louis boy figured out a way to get back to St. Louis. With a pregnant wife in tow.

And then the night they go to the hospital for Cameron’s induction (there must be something in the genes). He falls, hits his head, and I rush to the hospital at one in the morning. He’s not delirious, but he’s disoriented. The x-rays come in. Blood on the skull. The next day, Stephanie’s in labor, and he’s having brain surgery.

It all ends well. Cameron’s born. Two years later, Caden’s born. For Caden’s birth, he wears a bicycle helmet.

He, and his brother Andrew, have taught me two things about fatherhood.

The first thing: Once you become a father, you never stop being a father. How you’re a father changes, but you never stop being a father.

And the second this is, you don’t want to stop.

Happy birthday, Travis Young.

Photograph: Stephanie and Travis Young, with Caden obviously enjoying himself and Cameron standing quietly, with a friend's new baby.

Brennan Manning’s “Our Father”

I was a child in the 1950s, that era of Eisenhower and Elvis Presley and new technologies like home televisions and air conditioning. My parents were the Great Depression/World War II generation, and they were shaped by both those experiences. One of the things that life in a middle class home in a middle class suburb meant was that you never argued in front of the kids.

The one time I can remember my parents arguing had to do with me. I was eight. My father was to take me for a Saturday outing to the French Quarter, just the two of us.

A few years before, he had started his own printing business, and he worked every day, often for 12 hours or more. It was not unusual for me not to see him for weeks at a time. He would often be gone by the time I woke up in the morning and not return until after I was in bed at night.

The night before our French Quarter visit, he told me mother and me that he had to work that Saturday and he couldn’t take me as planned.

I don’t remember how I responded. Disappointment, likely. I don’t think I threw a tantrum, because I wasn’t a tantrum type of kid.

My mother got angry. She blew up. He blew up. They sent me to my room to get me out of the way (but not out of earshot). Later, my mother told me that the trip to the French Quarter was on, and my father and I would be going.

I remember the day as gray and overcast, leaning to the cool side. I know it was February 1960 because a Jackson Square artist did a pastel drawing of me, and signed and dated it. I still have the drawing, pastel on black paper. It’s a side view of my head and shoulders; he drew me wearing a white t-shirt. We ate coffee and doughnuts at Café DuMonde; and we visited the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral. I don’t recall much else, but it was enough. It’s the one time I can remember as a child spending an extended period of time with my father.

That argument, and that event, came to mind as I read the chapter entitled “Our Father” in Brennan Manning’s The Furious Longing of God. “Only Jesus revealed to an astonished Jewish community that God is truly Father,” Manning writes. “If you took the love of all the best mothers and fathers who have lived in the course of human history, all their goodness, kindness, patience, fidelity, wisdom, tenderness, strength, and love and united all those qualities in a single person, that person’s love would only be a faint shadow of the furious love and mercy in the heart of God the Father addressed to you and me at this moment.”

Many say that it is our fathers who shape our understanding of God. For me, for a long time, God was someone who was there but not actually involved in my life. And I didn’t live my life like he was actually and intimately involved.

It was a shock to learn that God not only loved me but that He was actively involved in loving me, that He considered me his much-loved child and that He was all over me.

It was frightening when I understood that. It still is occasionally. But over time the fear diminished and the confidence grew. No matter what happened or what I did, He was going to be there.

My father loved me. Like so many of his generation, he had a hard time showing that to his children. And while it hurt for a time not to be sure, it prepared me for love of God that was waiting for me.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Furious Longing of God. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

My father was a young man once

My father was a young man once:

high school football, dreams

of college and medicine but it all

changed one day, one fine

October day in 1929,

it all fell apart, shattering, shadows

splintering across the pathways,

disappearing into the reality

of no food on the table. Instead

of tending patients he tended

oil fields, the work was dirty

and smelly but it paid and it

fed four people,

even if he hated it, hated

the dirt and grease and grime

and coarseness and each payday

punctuating dream's end. I wonder

if he ever cried Abba.

This poem is submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. Please visit the site to see more poems.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.