I've posted this story before in a slightly different form, but I wanted to share this again for a very special reason.
You see, this is a gift to my Dad.
Last year, when the YearlyKos people asked me to contribute an essay to the Convention's eBook, unConventional, I was stumped by the assignment. They wanted to know how I became a liberal. The truth is, I can't ever remember being anything else. My political beliefs emerge from deep places inside of deep places, the places where my most fundamental understanding of what it means to exist in the world are kept. Of course, I am liberal. What else could I be?
But, when I thought about how my awareness of the world was shaped and nurtured, my subject matter became clear immediately. I flourished and grew in the values I held dear because my parents modeled and encouraged them, and my Dad, in particular, served as a constant inspiration to me to stand firm in the face of injustice.
I knew I was going to be pretty broke around Father's Day last year, so I decided to write this as my gift to him. It took awhile, but I was finally able to present him with the eBook several months later.
Now, I couldn't be happier and more proud to see that unConventional has become a real-live, ink-and-paper book. Sure, I know there are lots of other people's words and pictures in this book (and astonishingly good ones, too), but to me... well... all I see is my Dad, and my Mom, and a little girl with straggly, dishwater hair, who already knew she wanted to make the world a better place, and was convinced she could because her Dad had already done most of the heavy lifting.
Thanks, Dad. This book's for you.
One of the things for which I will always be most grateful to my parents is the lesson that, in many cases, silence is an injustice as sure as any physical brutality. The vigilance of people of good conscience is the surest weapon the forces of social justice have in their arsenal, and we have an obligation as human beings not only to keep a sharp eye out for the needs of our neighbors, but to keep a sharp tongue at the ready to ensure that injustice is checked before it spreads.
My stepdad is a Vietnam veteran. When he came back from Vietnam he did two things that reverberate through every facet of my life: he fell in love with my mom, and he got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I spent the early years of my life learning exactly what it meant to love your country enough to ask it to fulfill its great promise. I am who I am today largely because I was surrounded by men and women who had the tremendous courage to speak out at a time when it seemed they had no emotional home in a country they no longer recognized. I am forever in awe of the courage of VVAW. The fact that my parents and the other men and women who cared for me as a child had the guts to stand up and say, "No. Something is wrong here, and I'm not going to be silent about it," is an undeniable example of the strength and greatness human beings are capable of when pressed to their physical and moral limits.
When I was very young, my family and I were walking along the boardwalk on an incandescent California day when we encountered a man in a wheelchair. My dad seemed emotional and particularly moved by this man. He greeted him warmly, familiarly, but I could not remember ever having met him. When they had finished their greetings, my dad introduced him to me. "This is Ron Kovic," he said. "He's my friend. He just wrote a book about the war." Kovic smiled at me, and I will never forget the look in his eyes. They were sad and strong, and I knew, even at that early age, that I wanted to do what Kovic and my dad had done: speak the truth, and fight for the voiceless and powerless, no matter how hard, no matter how many brutal and ugly words were hurled at me like weapons.
At the very core of this nation's founding and governing principles is the notion that disagreement is fundamental to a rational, ethical political process, and that the suppression of disagreement is antithetical to the health of the body politic. We, as citizens, have the right and obligation to ensure that the political rhetorical landscape is a dialogue. Disagreement in the United States of America needs to be fostered for the good of all lest a single point of view become so associated with power that all else becomes suspect, persecuted or illegal. That is the very reason this nation exists. Demagogues have the legal right to say that liberals are unpatriotic merely because they are liberal. But, make no mistake -- they do not have the moral right to tell me that I don't love my country. I would die for my country. I wouldn't think twice about it. If I am sometimes critical of actions that are taken in my name as a citizen of the United States of America, it is because I believe in this nation enough to hold out hope that it really can fulfill the promise and potential it was endowed with over 200 years ago. Anybody who can place a lazy label on my political beliefs and then accuse me of not loving my country is blind or does not wish to see.
Like my beautiful country, I have not always lived up to my own promise to give voice to the voiceless in the face of bullies and bigots. But, I carry that promise with me, always, and in the darkest times, it is my light. It is what keeps me going when my own eyes are filled with sadness, and when my own exhaustion seems insurmountable.
I wish I could thank you, the men and women of VVAW, sufficiently. Words are too pale for the picture I want to paint you. For your part in nurturing a movement that keeps me in the fight, you will always be heroes to me. When everything else is just politics of the moment, that remains.
Please consider ordering a copy of unConventional. Proceeds benefit the YearlyKos Convention.
And, besides, I'd really like you to know my Dad.