The other day, a typed 3-page letter came to my 18 year old son from my wife's nearly 80 year old father. I'm certain his intentions were honorable as he laid out the philosophy he held of adult life and the pitfalls my son should be aware of in his foray into college and on to the "real world".
Below is my rebuttal which I'll send to my son and copy back to a man I once felt a connection to. I think it will fall on deaf ears.
Dear Keith,
I'm writing this letter to you in response to the one you received from your grandfather. I have no doubt his words exactly defined the convictions he now holds in his life and you should be honored he spent the time to put them to paper.
I'll address his final comments first because they most closely resembled the truth as I know it. In those, he addressed the choices you'll make in your life and the consequences of your actions. Your mother and I have repeatedly stressed that same message and I applaud your grandfather for reiterating that. So far, for the most part, you've shown us in your scholastic work, your choice of friends, your determination to stay away from the abuses of drugs and alcohol, and your ability to interact with people of all races and culture that you understand the concept of choice. I hope you understand that resting on your prior success will get you only so far and that those choices will continue on through the rest of your life.
Your grandfather's message in the first few pages however differs greatly from my view of the world, the humans that occupy it, and from the morals and ethics I believe your mother and I have tried to instill in you.
I've heard his message before in my studies of American politics and there's a tremendous backlash going on trying to fight against this fundamentalist conservative mindset that I believe has the potential to destroy the very fabric of our great nation. Your grandfather has accepted the politics of fear and elitism. His own financial success in life has insulated him from the very people in this nation that broke their backs to give him the opportunities he today enjoys.
He warns you that in college you'll be exposed to liberal idealism as if it is some sort of disease and insinuates that these professors and academics have some hidden agenda to remove personal responsibility from our national fabric. It's interesting to note that your grandfather was once a physics teacher himself who even went on to become a school superintendent. You might want to ask him, if there was such a threat within academia to liberally infiltrate the fertile minds of students, why he didn't remain in the profession to balance out that viewpoint. I'm certain that he left for the same reason conservatives aren't flocking into education these days. There's no money or financial success in the field. Isn't it ironic though that the very liberal and social program of public education is the very system that gave him the foot in the door and the resume to go on to his later pursuits.
Your grandfather rails about the evils of leftist thinking, giving the impression that there are only two points of view in our national discourse. He completely discounts that possibility that ideas from both camps can be successfully integrated in a balanced viewpoint. His philosophy and that of corporate conservative politics cannot tolerate gray areas in life. He somehow has bought into the party line that any dip into governmental socialism is the beginning of a spiral into Stalinistic excess.
What he fails to understand is that the success of American industry and business along with his own fortune would never have occurred without our experiments in national governmental programs. What private industry could have created our intricate system of roads and rail? When he takes a plane trip, would he feel comfortable relying on the separate airlines each dealing with just their own little piece of the air traffic? Does he enjoy the OnStar system in his Cadillac which needs this huge array of GPS satellites circling the Earth? I'm sure GM would've spend the billions required to put those in space so their cars would have another bell or whistle.
You may ask him if he appreciates the governmental grants given to universities across the country that have led to medical breakthroughs that have helped to extend his life. You might point out to him that we already live within a system of socialized medicine where nobody will be turned away at an emergency room but that system ends up extremely inefficient because many of those emergencies wouldn't occur with regular preventative medical care for all. The costs of that care have skyrocketed because of the huge burdens added on by the insurance companies and the mess of our medical coding system.
Keith, your grandfather for the past few decades has derived his income from the money of others in the field of financial planning and investment. It's a noble field but, during that time, he has not produced a single commodity, instead investing and gambling people's hard-earned savings in speculative markets and insurance policies. It has made him wealthy. But, every dollar he was entrusted with came originally from someone's sweat and blood, the ones toiling in the fields, blistered by the furnaces of steel mills, and turning wrenches in our factories. Those same people today are falling further and further behind, often unable to secure health care for their children or having the schools in their neighborhoods fall apart as more money is siphoned away from public education. You probably won't have to fight in a war because those same financially-strained neighbors will be in line at the recruiting stations hoping their tour of duty will pay the bills.
I don't want this letter to cause you to lose respect for this man. His life as a whole has probably caused more good for humanity than harm. Instead learn from this discourse. Know that even the best man can fall victim to the intoxicating security and wealth the conservative ideology promises especially as they get to the point in life when they're facing their own mortality. Just know that to have that assurance in life means giving up an important part of your soul, the part that gets nourished by a strong sense of community. Your grandfather always had trouble sleeping at night. I wonder why?