My Father…

I come to you today with a personal blog.  I don’t write many personal blogs.  It’s not a fear of people knowing something about me or anything of that sort.  It’s just that I don’t feel my life is that interesting.  However, today is different.  I feel God is telling me to write a blog in appreciation to my one of my favorite people.  My Father.  Before I get to the good stuff I will tell you up front that he and I go at it like nothing else.  We are both stubborn as hell and opinionated.  We butt heads quite often and will scream at each other at the top of our lungs.  Say hurtful things(hurtful for other people, but different for us).  Then two minutes later when everything is calm we can have a good conversation, laugh, and have dinner together like nothing happened.  Such is our relationship.  To be honest I think both of us like that kind interaction.

So I was reading on a blog what someone said about “suffering.”  That if we haven’t walked in other peoples shoe’s whom have truly “suffered” that we don’t know what it’s like.  Well I’m sorry I forgot that we all don’t have problems in our lives.  How do we get rid of problems?  Well the liberal answer is to throw money at it because that’s “real” compassion.  The conservative answer is education(not school), empowerment, and community support.  But to keep from getting off point I’ll get back to my father.  When I was about 3-5 years old he worked at Pepsi-Co in the factory.  He worked on the lines.  In fact, I think he set the record for production in a month.  I have no idea if that record is long gone by now, but he is definitely a man that takes pride in his work no matter what it may be at the time.  I remember I was too young to stay home alone and he had to work the night shifts.  I remember my parents waking me up 2-3AM and my Mother taking Dad to work because we only had one car.  Oh how I hated doing that.  Little did I understand that it was much worse for him to have to get up in the middle of the night to go work in a factory for however many hours, but I was just a little kid.  This is a man that worked 6 months on a broken ankle just to be able to afford a new mustang convertable for his wife so she could have something nice.  To this day he still shows those selfless qualities. 

Well one day he came home and gave us the bad news.  He was laid off.  We had no savings to speak of and he had no college education.  We were so broke that some nights I was eating peanut-butter crackers for dinner with water from the sink.  Some nights he would get a can of beets, cook them, and that would be dinner.  Can you imagine a 5 year old kid THANKFUL to have beets for dinner?  We were so poor that we went on food-stamps.  My father worked every job he could find just to find a way to put food on the table and pay some of the bills.  I emphasize some.  We were evicted from a couple places because of lack of funds.  This went on till I was about 10 years old.  Now, we were only on food-stamps for a month though because my father has too much pride.  He then saw an opportunity.

A couple of his friends were in construction and house painting.  He worked with them as hard as he could and learned everything he could from them.  He was a 35 year old man starting over in life with a wife and kid.  After a few years of working for other people he decided to take a risk.  He decided to start his own painting business.  He struggled for quite a while.  There were times we were hoping for just one job to pay the rent.  Nevermind water, electricity, and others we were just hopeful to have a roof over our head.  We did a lot of praying.  Well to finish up this story he has now owned his own business for over 13 years and is doing well.  For his sacrifices and refusal to quit in life I’ll always love him and who he is because I do believe being stubborn can be a very strong asset in life.

So what’s the point of my story?  To be honest it’s a story that shows the difference between liberals and conservatives.  There are MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of blue-collar, hard working Americans that do those same kinds of things in their own lives that my father has done.  Liberals seem content to define “suffering” in their own terms.  Well suffering for my Father was the fear of not providing the necessities for his wife and young child.  Liberals must be pretty arrogant to think that somehow they are special enough or talented enough to achieve in this country and others just can’t do the same for themselves.  They keep making them out to be victims of circumstance.  They keep holding them back by telling them it’s racism, or it’s “the rich”, or it’s society.  It’s just too hard.  Give them a hand out.  Treat them like children.  Where a conservative will tell them that they have the God-given ability to do anything they wish in a country so great as ours.  A conservative will tell them that if someone else can achieve then they can, too.  A conservative looks to empower and help people OUT of poverty.  Not keep them in it and yes liberal solutions do keep people poor.  My Father is just one example of many.  What a little stubborn pride can do for you in this great country.  So why look down on people and assume they can’t do the same?