Conservatives, Liberals, Jack & Jaki

I have written before about my relationship with my father Jack & politics.  It is a recurring theme in my life.

But a recent discussion on Facebook caused me to review that experience & share it again.

My father Jack was a passionate Republican.

His father, John Simpson Alexander Ettinger, was a passionate Democrat.

What I want to write about is that this passionate supportive of Republican/Conservative thought was a mentor for a passionate supporter of Democratic/Liberal thought.

I grew up watching every Republican  & every Democratic convention from the time I could write.  From Kennedy / Nixon.  One of the few times I could stay up past my bedtime those days.    

We watched with bated breath, believing that the final outcome of each nominee depended on the vote.  We did not believe in certainties or done deals when it came to the nomination of either party’s candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

In elementary & middle school, no one asked me if I was  a Democrat or Republican, if I was politically liberal or conservative.

But in high school, something happened.  An awareness of Vietnam.

A friend lost her brother.  Shortly before he was due to come back home to marry his fiancé.

My perspective changed.  I began to listen more to people opposed to the war.

I turned 18 the year the right to vote was granted to 18-year olds, who previously could be drafted & fight & die in a war without the right to vote.

As many of you know, one evening my father Jack asked me for whom I would vote in the 1972 election.  I told him that I was voting for McGovern-Shriver & he looked at me in dismay.

This man, who had never told me how to think, who had sat with me watching all those conventions, looked at me in dismay.

Then he told me that was the most stupid thing he had ever had heard out of my otherwise intelligent mouth & threw his plate of spaghetti across the room in what I can only interpret as frustration.

We really never did discuss politics again.  Something that grieves me to this day.

He knew my views.  I knew his views.  And we respected the difference.  He never disparaged my choice but we did not exchange ideas & those views

What I regret is that either of us did not know how to talk to one another about those differences.

Without throwing, or fearing the flight of a plate of spaghetti.

I would take the throwing, the flight of the plate, just to talk to him again.

And ask him what the hell was he thinking,