Father's Day
What is your answer to the question, "What is America's biggest problem"?
Immigration law? The terrorist threat? The Federal defecit? Funding for education? An oil-spewing hole in the Gulf floor? A second stimulus package?
Nope - none of these even come close for me. I think America's biggest problem is too few fathers in general, and specifically, too few like the one I had.
To paraphrase Toqueville, my father was a great man because he was a good man. I had the honor of delivering his eulogy, and I read that oration again this morning. And as I did, I reflected on the blessing it was to be raised by him.
I have traveled the world and have had the good fortune to see many things and to know many people. But more than anyone I have ever known, my Dad personified these words of Churchill: "All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope".
My Dad's given name was Rene, but he was known as "Bud". The home he was raised in still stands on Church Street in Kohler, just a short walk behind the American Club. That house is a metaphor of him - quiet, understated, strong. And while it is true that he lived his life in a simpler time, he anchored and predicated that life upon such simple themes as Churchill articulated. And he never let life's complications or viscitudes weaken his bedrock orientation towards such truths and realities.
Most people who briefly met my father rarely gave him a second thought - he didn't have much of a personality. And that's because he wasn't interested in personality; he was interested in character. Personality makes its instant impression, but character imparts a lasting one. Subsequently, those who came to know him never forgot him, a reality I continue to learn in conversations with people who did, and whose lives he impacted in such tangible ways. I had such a conversation recently with a man who used to be our neighbor. I was two at the time this story unfolded, and completely oblivious to it. This man shared with me the story of how he lost his first wife to cancer, leaving him alone to face life and the raising of his two young children. He shared the entire story, summing up with the emotion-choked comment, "your Dad couldn't save my wife. But he saved me".
Things like right and wrong, integrity, and duty were not just words to my Dad - they were the lighthouses by which he navigated the seas of life; the mooring slips to which he anchored his decisions. He was as uncomplicated as a glass of water - and as strong as the torrents of Niagra.
I'll say it again..............What America needs more than any of the things in my first paragraph is more Dads like the one I had.
Happy Father's Day, Dad.
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