A Peek Inside the Mind of a Conservative

Discipline for discipline’s sake.

Take care of #1. 

I am sure all Dads have pet sayings, offerings of wisdom to give to their children.  Those are the two I remember hearing most from my dad, whom my brother Joe christened “the Waynus” as in “Waynus the Painus.”  Dad, like his two brothers, had two names growing up.  He was Floyd Wayne.  His oldest brother was John Guy.  His second oldest brother was Harley Joe.  Mom said that when she first met Dad, she thought he had four brothers because he used their first and middle names interchangeably.  Luckily, Dad was only known as Wayne.  Or maybe he didn’t think he was so lucky when my brother came up with a nickname that has stuck for 40 years.  Although Dad doesn’t seem to mind now.  He even signs his emails “The Waynus.” 

Dad will turn 83 the day after Father’s Day.  We always celebrated Father’s Day and his birthday together, and he never seemed to resent the joke gifts, like the Jimmy Carter coffee cup or the George W. Bush talking doll (my sister and I, the liberals of the bunch, like to tweak Dad for his conservative views).  I bought my favorite gift for him from K-Mart when I was in middle school.  It was a red, white, and blue mesh baseball hat, the kind with an over-sized bill, and it said, “I’M PROUD TO BE A FARMER” on the front.  To me, it was a goofy tribute to the hours he spent in his large vegetable garden, including his morning and evening strolls to see what growth might have occurred in the intervening hours.  This irritated Mother, because after work he would go out into the garden before even coming into the house.  She only knew he was home when he plopped the basket of yellow squash on the counter.    Dad wore that hat for years, un-ironically, and I began to see it that way too.  It made me sad when the thing fell apart and it had to be thrown away. 

While Dad may not have been the kind of farmer who planted acres of corn or soybeans or kept cows and hogs, he spent his summers on his grandparents’ farm in rural Jennings County in southern Indiana during the Depression.  He once told me that his ancestors were not very smart because they chose to set up farms in the clay-like soil near Commiskey and Paris Crossing, instead of moving to more fertile ground to the north or west.   To this day, he can barely keep his eyes on the road when driving south down I-69 because he’s checking out the fields.  For Dad, the health of the crops is connected to the health of the economy, and thus the health of communities, families and individuals.  You can take the boy off the farm, but not the farm out of the boy, it seems.

My dad’s favorite sayings reflect this background.  Farming requires hard work, regardless of how weather or markets affect yields or prices.   Living in the inevitably lean periods means that discipline was meted out externally, as in “Discipline for discipline’s sake.”   Dad puts great stock in self-control for all behaviors, emotions, and actions.  For him, this is almost a moral imperative, and it’s tied directly to his other favorite saying, “Take care of #1.”

I used to roll my eyes when Dad would say that.  It seemed selfish at the least, criminal at worst.  It also did not correlate with what I was learning in Sunday School, which I attended at my parents’ behest.  This is probably why Dad argued with Pastor Krueger during his own Sunday School classes, as he found the books and teachings to be far too liberal for his taste.   You’d think Dad would actually practice some of this #1 business since he said it so many times, but he did not, at least not in the literal sense.  He and Mother regularly tithed to the aforementioned church.  Another, much bigger example occurred  after  the company he worked for, Kroger, asked that he move his family from Fort Wayne (they had moved my dad’s job from Chicago to Atlanta to Cincinnati to St. Louis to Fort Wayne during the previous ten years).   Because my sister Julie was about to enter high school, Dad said no.  He took less promising positions with smaller companies to ensure that we had a sense of stability and security in the family-friendly haven of Aboite Township. 

Thus, for the Waynus, taking care of #1 does not mean taking care of oneself at the expense of others, although he is an unrepentant capitalist and the only person I have ever met who didn’t like Franklin Roosevelt.  He believed FDR ushered in an era of individual dependence on the government.   Dad is definitely a “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of guy.  To a critical researcher and teacher like myself, it is easy to claim that he is insensitive to issues of class, race, gender, etc., and believe me, we have had those arguments.  However, my dad’s stories about this topic always revolve around how much a person appreciates what she earns by working for it instead of being given it.  As an illustration, he tells the story about how his dad once said to him, “I notice you take a lot better care of your own car than you ever did of mine.”  My dad took this admonishment to heart.  His point is that it is easy to take for granted things that are given to you instead of earned. 

While it pains me to know that my parents get their news from Fox and believe that yes, while climate change might now be legitimate, it is not necessarily a result of human behavior, I do think Dad has some wisdom to offer those of us starting from a level playing field.  For him, there is nothing like the satisfaction of earning one’s way.  Taking care of #1 requires the belief and the will to take care of oneself if given the opportunity.  It means independence.  It means responsibility, and perhaps, discipline for discipline’s sake.