The Great Political Divide in My Own Life

I have been thinking about this quote I heard the other day. It's from Warren Buffet the very wealthy investor who lives in my home state of Nebraska where his shareholders gather once a year for a big meeting in his hometown of Omaha. When you have a bazillion dollars the world wants to know what you think, anyway the western world does. Here is what he said that echoes something I concluded in my early twenties but at the same time something I have wrestled with for most of my life. 

“The womb from which you emerge determines your fate to an enormous degree. Just in my own case, I was born in 1930. I had two sisters that have every bit the intelligence I have, every bit the drive… but they didn’t have the same opportunities. I was a man. And I was white. So if I’d been black, my future would have been entirely different. If I’d been a female, my life would have been entirely different.” Warren Buffet

The reason this stands out to me is because I grew up in a family with parents who decided that their fate would be very different from the fate of the wombs in which they both emerged. If anyone has a father with self determination, it is ME. Thankfully he was blessed with a marriage to a very strong woman who endured much as  he sought to change their prescribed fate as a result of the parents they were born to. Their story is an amazing one and I would some day like to write down the details more fully but for now this is the story I know. 

My father grew up in a very small town in southeast Nebraska. His father owned an operated a mechanic shop for years but with very little knowledge of how to run a business and make a profit, he gave away a lot of business and as a result was forced to close down at some point. He later went to work for the Nebraska State Home and worked in the prison there with severely ill people who were very violent. He was beaten up a few times as part of the territory that came with such a position. I don't think he was paid very much when he worked there but it was a job and it was steady. If I remember correctly my grandpa also had done work with the WPA planting trees or something like that during the Great Depression. He didn't mind work but he was uneducated and times were very difficult. I don't recall a lot about his parents but my mom has been working on the family ancestry so I'm sure I'll find out more about that as time goes by. 

My Grandma was at home with her children as far as I know until she too worked at the Nebraska State Home where she took care of hydrocephalic babies. She didn't really know a lot about them except that they had "water on the brain" and as a result very large heads. Most of these little ones died while in her care and I'm guessing that had a bit to do with why she eventually was forced to stop working due to her "nerves". That's about all I really know except that she too didn't make a lot of money. 

When my paternal grandparents retired both of them relied exclusively on Social Security as their sole source of income. They were very poor but I had no idea until it was time to move them from their house after Grandma went to the nursing home. The house and property sold for $6,000 I think. Grandpa always had a nice car but I don't think it was ever a new one. They had never even considered sending their son to college and were actually quite grateful that he graduated from high school. 

My dad went into the Air Force after high school in the late '50's. He married my mom when he was 21 and she was 17. I came along a few months after her 18th birthday. She had given up her plans to graduate from high school to marry my dad. As the oldest of six her parents were eager to get her married off. She was very intelligent and could have been on the Dean's list were she not from a home with a lunatic for a father. The details would take some time to share but let's just say she was very grateful to be rescued from her home by my father. He was stationed at Great Falls, Montana, and there the three of us started our lives together. 

The Air Force changed my dad's life in ways I don't really understand but he will often say that if he hadn't enlisted and been taken away from his tiny little world in southeastern Nebraska, he would never have grown confident enough to become the man he is today. After a few years of trying to figure life out with my mom, me and my little brother who came along when I was almost two, he settled our family in western Nebraska where he got a job working for a city in their maintenance department. It wasn't long and his creative genius pushed him to open a car repair shop and eventually add a hydraulic component to his repair the business. My brother and I spent our primary years growing up going in and out of his shop and thinking that our dad was king. What to this day just astounds me about this time in his life is that somehow he was motivated to take engineering courses by correspondence. Night after night I remember going down into our basement where he'd set up a place to study and with a slide rule and pencils he'd do assignments mailing them in as he went. Unfortunately his business efforts failed and he was forced to close it. 

I don't recall the particulars but when I was midway through my 4th grade year, Dad moved our family to Montana because he'd located a job there working for a power transmission company. After just over two months there, we suddenly loaded up our belongings and moved to his home area in southeast Nebraska without work but near his family. It was all very exciting for me as an adventurous 9 year old but I'm sure he and my mom were nearly beside themselves with worry about their future. Eventually after day after day beating the streets of Omaha he found a position at an industrial supply company. I only know that he was with this company until I was in high school and became one of their highest paid salesmen. 

Dad was always tinkering with things. He could fix anything and as a result repairmen never came to our house. This was a bit of a problem when I got married and Dean couldn't just fix whatever...I mean, don't all men know how to fix whatever?? I was a young bride when I thought that. Back to my story. Dad embarrassed the heck out of me one winter when I was in high school by building, from scratch, a snow blower. The thing looked like a monster driving down our sidewalk and the snow, it did fly but oh, my goodness what a sight that was! 

Sometime while I was preoccupied with teenage life, my father invented a fertilizer blender for dry fertilizer and was able to successfully get a patent on it. He started manufacturing this blender in the back of an old gas station in a small town near us. At some point he asked his boss from the company in Omaha to make an investment in his invention and help him start a business. The boss told him he couldn't go wrong helping him do that because if he was successful, he'd buy his supplies from him and if he wasn't, he'd continue to work work for him and pay him back. So here is where this fate we're born into takes a turn for me. Here is where, because my dad asked, because a man was generous and because my dad was constantly trying to make it in the world, everything came together and his business got off the ground. EVERYTHING moved in a completely different direction from this time on. 

Today, my Dad is semi-retired. My brother now runs the company and it doesn't even manufacture the original blender that started it all. It would honestly take pages to share the growth that came as the result of a man with a brilliant mind, committed to learning from his mistakes and never giving up. It came because he and my mom worked as a team and she honestly was never paid what I know she was worth to the company because in her day being a silent unpaid partner was just expected. Shoot now she could claim to be the CEO and with her minority status as a woman I'm sure they'd get plenty of grant money and even a few government jobs ahead of the competition. My parents are very successful and the womb from which they came is not the reason they are successful. It is their determination, their will to succeed and the opportunities that came in conjunction with those things that have allowed them to get where they are now. BUT then there is ME. 

I come from them. I haven't invented a thing. I don't work for their company. They paid for me to get a degree in Elementary Education. They have blessed my life in every way possible and I know I did not get where I am as a result of my own ingenuity and hard work. I have wrestled with accepting myself because I am not an entrepreneur (yet!) I have never been able to produce a product that made a profit. In fact I worked for peanuts as a Christian school teacher. Without the benefits that are mine because my husband's and my family, I know I would be living very differently. I live daily with what is almost like survivors guilt. You know, when a tragedy strikes but you are left alive after many others have died. I often feel so guilty, as if I really haven't worked for my life even though I have worked and worked very hard at what I have done. It somehow never seems like enough coming from my family and though I know it is purely my issue, I struggle all of the time to feel as if I fit in. During the election Dad forwarded an email to me about a spoiled liberal rich girl and it didn't even occur to him that I might think he wanted me to get a clue that this was me.  I asked him specifically and surprised he said that wasn't even what was on his mind but for about 24 hours I felt just terrible. 

The deal is that after high school my life was shaped very much by the profession I chose to go into. As an educator, I wanted nothing more than to empower all of my students with the belief that they had value and could do whatever they wanted in the world. Unfortunately, the harshest reality that I have had to face year after year is that we simply are not born equal to one another. I had to grasp that my father and mother are exceptions to the rule and though I am beyond grateful for them and exceedingly proud of their achievements, mine will NEVER look like theirs. My achievements will NEVER look like my brothers as he now operates and expands the business. In every way I often feel like the black sheep of the family because our paradigm of life is so drastically different as the result of what we do for a living. 

At present, I am struggling with the reality that my teaching career is over in the way I always knew it. My body has been severely traumatized from a surgery gone bad that resulted in several more surgeries leaving me with chronic pain that I'm still learning to live with and overcome. I am thankful for my husband and the reality that he had no issue with providing for me as his wife but I miss working. I love working and I work incredibly hard. The profit I have to show for my work is out there somewhere largely for only God to see as the students I had the privilege to teach are making their way in the world. It is in the customers I helped find the right book at the Christian bookstore and with parents and girls I worked with in the adolescent eating disorders program. I feel very rewarded as I think of them but I have nothing tangible to show for it. 

I realize I have veered off of Warren Buffet's quote a little but I wonder if my story isn't a part of the great divide in our political world right now. I really get my father's and all business owner's frustrations with all of the government regulations that make manufacturing products in the US so difficult. BUT I also get the frustration of  those like me who rely solely one the will of others to be able to do what we do. I know that if the government doesn't hear us, private businesses likely won't. I also know that as a public school teacher, I faced the reality that I had to teach ALL students regardless of their commitment (or their parent's) to their education and face the results of their test scores as if it was exclusively up to me that they succeed. I really get this and it's a bit painful. 

So, yes, I am in the middle of this great divide and that is why it is so important to me that we figure out how to see from each other's side of the proverbial fence. I believe that if we don't figure it out, we may just split ourselves apart even more and that would be a very sad thing. This is an amazing experiment this democracy of ours. Okay, enough for now. I'm sure there will be more later.