I realize that this is an intense week, but I want to honor him here. He was 86 years old when he died, married 60 years and 3 weeks. My mom has dementia (they call it happy dementia - she's very funny and sweet), and we have to keep telling her that he's gone, which is hard.
He was a faithful Republican until the Vietnam/Nixon era. He and mom encouraged my brother, who was really struggling and in lots of trouble, to enlist in the Marine Corps. Chris came home after Boot Camp and talked to us about the training, the racial slurs (gooks), the demonizing of the enemy.
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He couldn't stomach glorifying what he came to believe was organized murder, or the brainwashing required to turn ordinary people into killing machines. It was a watershed moment for my dad. He remembered his own Boot Camp experiences, and heard Chris loud and clear. He and mom helped Chris get to Canada, and we all stonewalled the Marine Corps when they came looking for him. Dad became active in "Clergy and Laymen Concerned About the War", and his congregation invited him to leave.
His next job, at a very low salary for an inner-city church, was ministering to troubled teens. These were kids from "broken" families, with alcoholic and/or abusive parents, and they had no hope. His work with them pushed him into questioning his country's values, and he did a lot of writing about the disconnect between what America claimed to be, and what it actually was.
Dire financial straits sent him looking for a call that would pay him better, and the family ended up in North Dakota, 90 miles from Canada, on the Minnesota border. He had one church in town, two in the country, and spent a lot of time driving. He drove past missile installations daily, wondered why there were so many of them in this isolated area. His research revealed that the area was chosen because counterstrikes from the USSR would result in casualties "less than a megadeath".
Dad was appalled to think that a million people were considered "disposable" by the military. He wrote an editorial, "Reflections From Ground Zero" that was picked up and published in the New York Times. He knew this would blow up in his face, especially because the word was out about our fight to bring Chris home, but his conscience required that he fight for the lives of the people who were, ultimately, going to fire him. And they did indeed fire him.
He finished his working life as a counselor for alcoholics and addicts, a ministry that freed him from congregational politics and allowed him to make a difference in the lives of people who felt hopeless, helpless, and worthless. I've talked to many of them over the years, and they loved him for loving them back to health.
A year ago dad found a bumper sticker that tickled him: "Enough is enough! Vote Democratic." He loved Obama and was excited about his candidacy. He kept getting letters from the McCain campaign asking for donations, and sent every one of them back with a letter telling McCain why he would never consider voting for him. (He was a little annoyed that they didn't seem to have read his letters, and continued to ask for money.) He donated to Obama in spite of low cash flow, and got a kick out of getting into arguments with McCain supporters. They never stood a chance against my dad, he was the smartest man I've ever known, and a killer debater with endless facts to buttress his arguments. He was an avid reader all his life, and could quote Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin, Jung, Epictitus, the Bible and just about everyone else worth quoting. He always won, if his opponent was willing to listen long enough.
I miss him. I miss his rants about rapacious capitalism, and Big Pharma, and the unforgivable idiocy of the Bush administration. I miss his wit and humor. I'm grateful to have grown up with parents who valued education and insisted on clarity of thought. I'm glad I learned early that ambiguity is built in to life, that black and white thinking is dangerous, and that everyone should know the root meaning of words, and should be able to sing Bach's Mass in B-Minor.
I'm grateful that my dad was willing to stand up for what he believed in, and that he taught his kids to do the same. I wish he'd been able to cast his vote for Barack Obama.