I Committed What My Daddy Considered To Be The Ultimate Political Sin When I Rebelled Against A Lifetime Of Assured Poverty

This Story begins with me being a young man and my daddy warning me against wasting my life working for “Those Damned Rich Democrats, while he, himself, worked at a job that paid only a paltry $35 a week with no benefits whatever for A Republican Trustee Group in a Republican town in a Republican state— and I rebelled against being poor the rest of my life because of Daddy’s visions for my future…..

When I became an adult, I went to Detroit, Michigan, and got a job working for one of the “Big Three” auto manufacturing plants.

And that was where my life began to change.

I worked under a contract negotiated by one of the biggest unions ever, and that union was one of the strongest supporters of Democratic politicians and Democratic political causes in the country.

The union encouraged us to vote for Democrats.

The union supported Democrats.

And the union seemed to me to believe that Democratic politicians were more likely to protect the wages, benefits, and collective bargaining rights that automobile workers had fought so hard to obtain.

So when I say that I went to Detroit to work for those damned Democrats, that is exactly what I mean.

I didn’t mean that the Democratic Party owned the company for which i worked:

I meant that I went to work in an automobile plant where my wages, working conditions, and employment protections were governed by a union contract, and where the union representing me encouraged its members to support Democrats.

And I found that arrangement considerably more beneficial than the one my father had enjoyed working for Republican trustees.

There was something almost comical about the whole situation.

My Republican father had spent years telling me that rich Democrats were responsible for keeping poor working Republicans from getting ahead.

He worked for Republican trustees in a Republican town in a Republican state, digging graves for thirty-five dollars a week.

And he wanted me to follow in his footsteps.

Instead, I went to Detroit, got a job in the car plant, worked under a union contract, and began building a life that would have been almost unimaginable to me when I was growing up.

Those damned Democrats!

They were supposed to be the enemy.

They were supposed to be the people who kept hardworking Republicans like my father poor.

But there I was, working in a unionized automobile plant, earning a living, and discovering that the world didn’t operate quite the way my father had always insisted it did.

And the more I thought about it, the more I began to appreciate the irony.

My father had worked for Republicans who paid him thirty-five dollars a week with no health insurance, no sick days, no time off, no bonuses, no regular raises .. none of that “Malarky” that he would have considered to be “Charity” … which he was not going to take …Daddy was proud that he simply had a “Decent Respectable” job and he never once complained that he was working for such pitiful wages under such conditions.

I worked under a union contract negotiated by an organization that encouraged me to vote for Democrats.

And I was finally getting somewhere in life.

My first paycheck for a week’s work at the auto plant was more than Three Hundred dollars, Ten times as much as Dad’s was.

Now, I am not suggesting that the Democratic Party personally handed me my paycheck. The car plant where I worked paid my wages, and I earned every dollar by doing my job.

But I am saying that the union representing me helped establish the conditions under which I worked and earned those wages.

That distinction matters.

Because the lesson I took away from my experience wasn’t that every Democrat was wonderful or that every Republican was terrible.

The lesson was that a working man’s economic interests are not necessarily served by the political party to which he has pledged his lifelong allegiance.

My father never seemed to understand that.

He remained convinced that Democrats were the problem, even while the Republicans who controlled his little corner of the world were paying him wages that kept our family in poverty.

I had no intention of repeating that experience.

I didn’t go to Detroit to become a Democrat.

I went to Detroit to make a living.

But I discovered that the union helping protect my interests as a worker was encouraging me to support the very political party my father had taught me to distrust.

And I couldn’t help noticing that my circumstances were improving.

I sometimes wonder what my father would have said if I had sat him down and explained all of that.

I can almost hear him now.

He probably would have found some way to blame the Democrats anyway.

But I had something more convincing than his political arguments.

I had a job.

I had a union contract.

I had an opportunity to build a decent life.

And I wasn’t digging graves for thirty-five dollars a week.

My father had his Republican principles.

I had my union contract.

And when it came to putting food on the table and building a future, I knew which one had done more for me.