A political conversation with my father

When I visited home for my sister's birthday, my father and I ended up having a discussion. I was standing out on the porch in front of his farm house, and he stormed out after watching something on the news saying something about the Occupy Wall St. movement.

Now, I didn't give a happy damn at first about Occupy, but I thought his criticisms of Occupy were silly. He said "they're college kids, living on the parents' money, probably cutting class." Wait, if I understand correctly, unemployment is one of the things they are angry about. So the only people who are allowed to complain about unemployment now are people who have secure jobs? That's pretty cheap if you ask me.

As our conversation continued, I began to form the notion that the Occupy movement really isn't much of a different thing from the Tea Party movement. Some of the participants are different, but their concerns are pretty much the same. In response to this, my father blasted, "well, they were different. They actually had jobs. They worked for a living. Their issue was the government wasting their money. You know what TEA stands for, by the way? 'Taxed Enough Already.'" Okay, so apparently he thinks it's legitimate to complain about being taxed on money you earn at a job but not so legitimate to complain about unemployment making it impossible to find a job. Apparently, he hasn't been unemployed recently, and he has forgotten how completely it sucks.

Well, I finally cornered him on this one point. I asked him, "Okay, what would you do? What reforms would you propose if you could impose any reform?"

After explaining an example of one of Obama's lobbyists getting a fat check from the government and then going belly-up, he said essentially that he would want to cut down on lobbyists controlling where the money goes and how the laws are made.

Well, I gestured at the television, and I said to him, "okay, now what were the protesters advocating again?"

He declined to answer.