Dad and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on much including, of course, politics.
Not that I ever knew the man to actually walk into a voting booth. His first go-to answer for not voting was that they were all crooks. His second go-to answer was that he didn’t want to register to vote because he didn’t want jury duty. Heaven forbid that he should make a sacrifice of his precious time.
When Texas changed the law and started to use the Texas Driver License registrations to add to the jury duty list, he gave in and registered to vote. "Now I can cancel out your vote." He smiled and almost giggled. What the hell? That grated on me a bit. Just another insult from the old man, but it also degraded the reason to vote. Vote, yes vote, but do it because you believe in something. Not because you want to insult your son’s judgement.
As I almost always did around him I held my tongue, but I did have a retort in mind: “Okay, Dad that’s just fine -- cancel out my vote. Here, let me write out a $2,000 check for my guy. Let’s see you cancel that out.” I can think like a prick with the best of them -- it's quite easy, but I find it easier going in life by not acting like one. Dad never quite learned that lesson.
I put up with his negativity and jibes at me for decades. As I’ve been thinking about them a lot over the past few weeks I finally asked myself the other day. "Why the hell did you put up with that crap?"
Doug, all the Green kids were raised in a cloud of negativity. I doubt any of them ever heard a compliment in their entire youth. That low self esteem was all they had to pass on to their kids because the had no example of positive feedback to pass on. I was lucky, the air force taught me to respect myself and others. Pauline and Clyde did not teach that to their kids.
ReplyDeleteMy dad took all the negativity from his life and taught me the opposite. He taught me how to be strong, that I was worth something, that if I work hard I can accomplish everything, and not to take anything for granted. He never showed me the negativity that was shown to him.
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