Father’s conservative values guides a liberal

When I was 7, before I knew better, I suggested during a long car ride to Cape Cod that if the world was overpopulated we should just kill the extra people. My father, who hid his shock well, said, “Who decides who dies and who lives?” Many times since then I have asked that question.

My father voted for Donald Trump. He came to his position out of a conservative Christian background with roots in Zion, Ill., a religious colony created by the Rev. John Alexander Dowie, who was an evangelist and faith healer, as well as from 50 years of apocalyptic political and economic propaganda. My father believes that God can work through Trump to create good and that my soul is imperiled because I don’t attend church.

And yet.

When I was growing up, he would walk the streets near our home picking up litter. We are stewards of the earth, he’d say. Now, he refuses to admit the scientific truth of global warming, even as he is careful to recycle and puts water in the solar batteries used to power his home.

He spent hours reading to a pilot friend dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was a trustee at the church. He gave money to the Salvation Army to feed people. He was an airline pilot and, sometimes on his trips, would be approached by street people for money. Instead, he bought them meals, had conversations. He was gifted with the ability to talk to anyone, and I remember how powerful a lesson it was that he treated everyone with dignity. In these actions, he exemplified for me the Christian command to love your neighbor. Yet now, he is angry about immigrants “taking over,” worries that they are bringing Kissing Bugs over the border along with their children, thinks Black Lives Matter is about privileging people who already have enough privileges.

What Dad taught me to care about — and what I hope we all care about, Republican, Democrat or Independent — is the values the person next to us at the stoplight or in the grocery line, the person representing us in the state legislature or in Congress or in the White House, holds. Does he care not only about the people like him, but the people across the street, people of color, disabled people, people exhausted from working two or three jobs, women, the disempowered, the politically oppressed, the violated, the frightened and bullied? Does she have a generosity of spirit? Does he demonstrate love? Is she in her political position to serve and not for selfaggrandizement?

The values he has given me are basic. Make sure people have what they need to function in life: food, shelter, clothing, work, pension, health care, respect. He approaches these values from the angle of personal rather than communal responsibility, but he has compassion, something I try to remember when he’s lecturing me about the latest thing he heard on Fox News. I think most of us want similar things. It’s who speaks for us now that matters, because they influence who dies and who lives.