"Don't worry honey. We owe a lot to our children."
My father can be a pretty memorable guy. I mean, don't tell him I ever said that. We have that gruff, father son facade to keep up, wherein we have to let our mutual respect come out only occasionally, as if by mistake. But the truth of the matter is that there's a lot about him to respect. He's a stunningly good teacher. Over the course of his career as a college professor, he's won dozens of teaching awards, some even on the national level. I've run into people in New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, and even Rome who have told me that his classes changed how they thought. As someone who is in education, that's the kind of impact you dream about having.
But for me, as his son, the most memorable thing he ever said to me happened just a few years ago. It's funny, because the exact context escapes me. Oh, I know I was asking him for money. I know it was some kind of emergency, and that I needed help. I think the true definition of privileged, beyond education, is having family who you know have both the desire and the means to help you out when bumps small or large appear in the road. But this particular time, I was feeling bad about needing help. My pride was wounded. Here I was, in my early 30's, asking my Dad for money. Didn't this imply some kind of failure on my part? What had I done wrong?
And then he said it.
"Don't worry honey. We owe a lot to our children."
I remember, it seemed a strange thing to me at the time. It somehow comforted me, because I recognized it was something that my Dad truly believed. But I didn't really understand what he meant, or why he believed it. I let it assuage me, I accepted it, I moved on. But I didn't forget the words.
We owe a lot to our children.
When I was growing up, in Indiana in the 70's and 80's, friends would refer to my Dad as "the Commie." It was, to be clear, a loving reference. I know that sounds odd, for "the Commie" to be loving, but you'll have to trust me when I say that it was. He was unabashedly liberal in Indiana in the 1980's, so my friends, smart-ass purveyors of hyperbole, dubbed him the Commie. But his politics rubbed off on me at a very young age. I learned about the civil rights movement, about social justice, about issues of race and gender and sexuality. About the social contract, the responsibility of those who are more fortunate to help those who are less so. About care for the environment, for animals, for the world we would leave behind for future generations. To be fair, I learned all of this as much from my remarkable mother as from my father, and I suspect she shares his philosophy, but this is about his words.
We owe a lot to our children.
You see, at first I took that to be something very literal. I took it to be the belief that the very best way to pay back your parents for everything they have given you (if you are lucky enough to have parents like mine) is to give everything you can to your own children. Every opportunity. Every bit of love and support and guidance and accpetance. And frankly, I do think that that's part of what he meant. We owe a lot to our children because we owe a lot to our parents.
But the more I thought about my father's life, his beliefs, his values, the more I realized that, though I am one of the three children he fathered, to him, owing a lot to our children is about a lot more than me and my two brothers. To him, owing a lot to our children is about the next generation. And the generation after that. And so forth and so on as long as we keep on keeping on and this planet of ours manages to hold out.
We owe a lot to our children is this basis of his politics, the basis of my own. It is why we (my father and I, and I think many others) fight for social justice. It is why we fight for enivironmental protection, for universal health care, for peace. It is why we want to reduce discrimination and prejudice, why we want to build bridges between different communities, why we strive to understand other perspectives.
We owe a lot to our children.
I may well never have children of my own. I am 38, single, gay. The cards are pretty well stacked against my raising any little dedmonds of my own. It sometimes makes me a but wistful. But it's all right. I still owe a lot to my children. That still remains the fuel in my political engine, the thing that drives me when I give my time and energy and money causes I believe in.
I owe a lot to my children and in the new year, I'll do my best to give the most I ever have.