My Father the Wingnut
I was somewhat surprised by my personal reaction to the story about Michele Bachmann's son joining Americorp.Normally I would be amused at the irony. Instead, I felt ... sympathy?
My father is 75 years old and over the past fifteen years or so, he has devolved from a fairly enlightened and thoughtful person into an angry, lobotomized right-wing parrot. He watches Fox News and listens to Rush Limbaugh all the times and when a political discussion breaks out at family gatherings, he invariably mutters something he heard Limbaugh or Beck or O'Reilly say. I used to argue with him, but I don't bother anymore. What's left of his mind is made up.
When I was a kid back in the 1960's, we lived in the western suburbs of Chicago and my father was the local director of an ecumenical church program called Friendly Town. The idea was to bring underprivileged, mostly afro-american children out of Chicago to stay in more affluent, suburrban homes for a couple of weeks. The white suburban kids (we were all white in my town) got exposure to afro-americans and the afro-american kids got a taste of the "good life." The two week stinit ended in a big picnic with all the families who particpated in the program attending along with the families of the children who were visiting. Some of the connections made with this program were lasting ones. This program was wildly progressive at that place and time and my father took a lot of heat for it in the local community.
I mention this because my father was my liberal role model. I'm a liberal today because of things like this that he did back then. One of the the great disappointments in my life is that my father is so different now. His political transformation has changed our relationship across the board and I'm very sorry it happened that way. For this reason, I guess I feel a bit of sympathy for what's going on in the Bachmann family. I hope they do better at dealing with it than my father and I do.
My father is 75 years old and over the past fifteen years or so, he has devolved from a fairly enlightened and thoughtful person into an angry, lobotomized right-wing parrot. He watches Fox News and listens to Rush Limbaugh all the times and when a political discussion breaks out at family gatherings, he invariably mutters something he heard Limbaugh or Beck or O'Reilly say. I used to argue with him, but I don't bother anymore. What's left of his mind is made up.
When I was a kid back in the 1960's, we lived in the western suburbs of Chicago and my father was the local director of an ecumenical church program called Friendly Town. The idea was to bring underprivileged, mostly afro-american children out of Chicago to stay in more affluent, suburrban homes for a couple of weeks. The white suburban kids (we were all white in my town) got exposure to afro-americans and the afro-american kids got a taste of the "good life." The two week stinit ended in a big picnic with all the families who particpated in the program attending along with the families of the children who were visiting. Some of the connections made with this program were lasting ones. This program was wildly progressive at that place and time and my father took a lot of heat for it in the local community.
I mention this because my father was my liberal role model. I'm a liberal today because of things like this that he did back then. One of the the great disappointments in my life is that my father is so different now. His political transformation has changed our relationship across the board and I'm very sorry it happened that way. For this reason, I guess I feel a bit of sympathy for what's going on in the Bachmann family. I hope they do better at dealing with it than my father and I do.
