My dad was a good person, so much so, that he's the bar I use for other southerners. I knew him up and down, his motivations and what he really believed. It took a few years to get there but he laid it all bare if you gave him enough time to tell his stories and see the cracks in the red-white-and-blue paint.

My dad was born in 1938, a son to a blue collar worker too old for the draft, but still close enough to WWII for the reveling and the patriotism. Dad was seasoned with the goings-on in the 50's and 60's, events and hype. He drove his Dodge and Chevies, watched Eastwood films, jammed to Johnny, Waylon, Willie and the boys, and smoked a pack a day until he was 60-something. He even had a stint as a cop for a few months until it got to his conscience.

Dad was not "that guy". Dad repeated phrases and sayings of other men to fit in, but like anyone else in the South, It's what you do, not what you say. Even having said that, I have a hard time even finding an n-word from the man in my mental record in the 28 years I knew him.

He'd say something to the effect of:

"Well, yeah, we... had a hand in some riots, but I wasn't there that long. I didn't like the work."

Why he didn't like the work, he wouldn't outwardly say in that moment, as his generation mainly kept those types of thoughts to themselves, and my dad would be the last person to paint a bad picture of the cops. No one would ever "say", or show weakness. It's just not in the Dude Bible of the 1960's. You had to catch the details in passing or bait it out some other way, but his way of telling stories all the time got the job done, and there was one other thing. There was one aspect of my dad that came with most people born in the late 30s. Dad. HATED. NAZIS.

Dad hated ze nazis so much that they dominated any other hate for anything else. Dad's hate for nazis even eclipsed his born-into hate for communists. Dad had a soft-spot for Russia -for fucking over the nazis! Dad hated nazis even when there was no call for hating anything, and the symbolism used. You couldn't have "any old cross" in the house. It had to be peer-reviewed (by him, naturally) to make sure Hitler didn't use it, which actually happened in relation to a necklace I had once.

Dad read a lot in his final days, a lot of political analysis books, usually stuff about global spy networks and shadow governments ran by oligarchs. I was too young to see who or what these influences were, good or bad, but in memory, dad wasn't too happy with the state of the world by the late 2000's.

"We are at the mercy of the super rich and super intelligent."

Dad's entire ethos was patriotism. But by then, he had pride in his country, but not his government. He had pride in a down-home southern farmer's market, but not Bush or Obama. There was a love in him, but a hurt in him, a feeling that he was physically and mentally out of time with the world. It had been better, it had been right and just and now was not, although I believe proof to the contrary had hit him by then.

Dad never gave anything the benefit of the doubt but God, and nobody and nothing else got the pleasure of having it. If you said something fucked up and insensitive to him, he's slap the snot out of you. If you said it with God or America's blessing and quoted some congressional dribble, you'd get "the look". (aka: "Smartass...")

By and large, my dad is my great example of how upbringing, peer pressure, time and place can't hide or ruin who a person is at their core. Dad's conscience walked him away time and time again from the worst crimes you can commit against other men.

He had lowered every gun he'd ever aimed.

"You know, Jack really wants to shoot a deer. I've seen two or three already and it's only been a few hours since we put the salt out."

"why didn't you shoot one?"

"I... I don't want to take anything from Jack is all..."

#fathersday #dad