Personal:

My moral compass

While I was driving home a little while ago, I saw a bumper sticker that said, "What would Ernest Stubbs do?" I wasn’t sure who Ernest Stubbs was, but it reminded me both of another bumper sticker I've seen, "What would Jesus do?", and what I ask myself when I am confronted with a decision, a moral question, which is "What would my father do?"

My father is an ordinary man. He sacrificed his dreams and ambitions to ensure that his family was provided for. One of the earliest memories I have of my father is of him leaving out the front door of our house with an armload of books, going to college. I must have been only a year old when I saw that, but I remember it well. He had to drop out of college and postpone his education to work at the factory where his father worked to make sure that we had enough money to pay the bills.

My father is an ordinary man. Another early memory I have is of when my father was laid off from his factory job in 1968. My brother had just been born that year, and my parents had bought a new house to make sure that our growing family had enough room. I will never forget his expression when he got home the day he lost his job. I saw uncertainty on his face for the first time. I didn't understand it then and I was afraid. I understand that uncertainty all too well now.

My father is an ordinary man. When my father was laid off in 1968, he found another job at a company in northern Mississippi as the plant manager. It was a medium sized factory that made household goods (ironing board covers, clothes pin bags, and similar things) along with some food products (pancake syrup, mouthwash) for other, name-brand companies on a contract basis.

My father is an ordinary man. For 35 years, my father worked at the job he found after being laid off in 1968, working his way up from plant manager to vice president level running the entire site. After going to night school for years, he earned his bachelors degree in 1982, the year I graduated from high school. After the factory had been sold by one company to another several times and treated like an unwanted stepchild, the last company that owned it made a series of very bad decisions, and finally the factory shut down in 2002. My father turned off the lights.

My father is an ordinary man. After being laid off again, now in his early 60s, he went out and sought another job. Today, he is working as a shift supervisor on the production line in a chemicals factory, back on a factory floor again working 50 hours a week after 35 years of working in an office as a senior manager. Working on a factory floor again as he did before he was laid off in 1968, because no one would hire a 61 year old man who had run a medium sized factory as anything more than a shift supervisor. Still, after being laid off in 2003, he found a job that paid the bills and had reasonable insurance beneifts, just as he did in 1968, and he still makes sure he provides for his wife after 40 years of marriage.

My father is an ordinary man. Over the years, he has bought a few vintage cars he plans to restore when he retires, an Austin Healy Bugeye Sprite, an Austin Healy Mark 3000, and a Triumph TR-3. When I was in high school, my father allowed me to use his Sprite in our production of the musical Grease, and even though one of the performers doing backflips off the car damaged the back of the car, he never said a word of rebuke to me.

My father is an ordinary man. He had me work at his factory when I was 15 and 16 to show me what kind of job I would get if I did not go to college, scraping rust off of fences and lamposts and cleaning bathrooms on the factory floor using acid. He then made sure I had everything I needed to go to college, and when I hadn't earned enough money in the summers to pay, he made up the difference.

My father is an ordinary man. My father's brother disappeared five years ago, abandoning his wife and two children. My father's brother called the police department of the town he had lived in to say that he was walking away from a family that had trapped him. My father made sure that his brother's family was taken care of and was not in need. My father has never spoken an ill word of his brother, although I can see a hint of the bitter disappointment he feels when his mother, my grandmother, speaks of her younger son and how she misses him. I suspect I am the only one who sees the broken heart in my father.

My father is an ordinary man. He doesn’t expect to ever be rich, and he has never desired fame. He just wants to be left alone to live his life in peace. My father does what he can to help my mother, who was diagnosed as bipolar the year I got married and moved away from home in 1987 after graduating college. He gave up many of his dreams for his family. He now lives his dreams through me, for what little solace that can possibly give him.

My father is an ordinary man. My father is a quiet man. My father is a good and decent man.

Unfortunately, there are very few "ordinary men" any more.

I know why I ask, “What would my father do?” Every day I try to live up to the example my father has made for me. I do not always succeed, but he loves me anyway, because he doesn't always succeed at the example he has set for himself. I am very fortunate, because I am living the life that my father wished he had been able to live. For me, the answer to the question "who do you admire most" is a simple one.

My father is one of the very few men in the world I respect.

Children learn far more from the example of their parents than they ever learn in school. Although it seems obvious to me, it does not seem to be obvious to all, schools cannot teach fundamental morals and ethics. The most basic lessons of behavior are learned long before even kindergarten. We cannot expect the public schools to teach what the parents do not.

Not only do we get the government we deserve, but we get the children and legacy we deserve, too.

Posted by Jack at 22:18 on Friday 19 December 2003 | Trackbacks (2)
baldilocks linked with Saturday Shorts
Straight White Guy linked with An Ordinary Man...