My Dad & Politics: How I Learned to be a Compassionate Person

With it being Inauguration Day in the US, it feels like the right time to write this. It's been rolling around in my head since early November but was a little too painful to type up - until now.

Thankfully grief therapy has been helping get comfortable with being uncomfortable, especially when it comes to grieving the loss of my father. I have begun to wrap my head around the fact that this is a long process of healing and it will likely take me years to work through. That's okay, I'm in for the long haul. Because, quite frankly, what choice do I have? 

My therapist has used my favorite quote many times since I started seeing her: THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH. I used this phrase a lot in 2018 when I first started working on removing alcohol from my life (and first realized how much I relied on alcohol for emotional support - it was startling). That period of my life (2018-2021, the "drying out years", as I like to call them) was truly my first introduction to "embracing the suck" and "getting comfortable with being uncomfortable." Who knew giving up alcohol was only the beginning, and that doing this tough emotional work would actually become my lifelong mission?

But I digress.

If I haven't lost you yet, this post is related to Trump taking office today. Here it is: a lot of my grief over what happened in the 2024 presidential election is tangled up in the grief I feel about losing my dad, the two incidents are entwined. And the reason is because everything I know and feel about politics can be traced back to my dad.

My dad was one of the smartest people I knew when it came to politics and I looked up to him from childhood into adulthood. He was a realist, but he was also extremely compassionate. I learned from a young age that he mostly aligned with the democratic party and that he believed in basic human rights. When I was old enough to vote, I looked to him for guidance and learned a lot from him. I'm now probably a little more left-leaning than my dad was, but I credit him for teaching me about being a civic-minded, compassionate constituent.

I am not going to speak for my dad's political views because that would be unfair and honestly I don't know where he stood on every single issue. But things I knew (because he told me) were that he staunchly despised Trump, he thought he had no business leading our country, and he thought he was a legitimate danger to our democracy. My dad was an Airforce Veteran, a man who loved his country, who served for his country, and he told me what he saw happening at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was the most disgusting and hateful thing he had witnessed since watching the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11. He said it was UNAMERICAN. And that disgusting act of treason was incited by Donald Trump, FULL STOP.

In all his great political wisdom my dad also told me sometime in early 2022 that if Trump ran for re-election in 2024 he would probably win. I didn't want to believe him. I was sort of mad when he said it. I mean, the man incited an insurrection against our government, surely he wouldn't even be allowed to run, never mind would he win! But my dad knew, he knew the force behind the Trump Republican party, he knew how Trump had the Supreme Court stacked in his favor, he knew that the American voters who supported Trump before would come back tenfold (I mean, we saw some of them literally storm the Capitol to "take back the election" in '21 - they were still there, still believing something was "stolen" from them for 4 years under the Biden Administration, that anger doesn't just disappear), he knew that people would believe lies told about immigrants, transgender citizens, inflation/the economy, and abortion because when people are afraid, fed up, or just plain uninformed, they will believe what they think will suit them best to make them feel better. Trump doesn't "tell it like it is", he tells people what they want to hear, and they believe it. 

And damn it, my dad was right.

My dad went into the hospital just before Biden decided to step down from the presidential race. In fact, the last time my dad and I had a conversation (when I visited him at Mass General), a lot of what we discussed was about the presidential election. That's what my dad and I did, we talked about politics: we celebrated the wins, we complained about the losses, and we laughed (or more times than not, lamented) over the batshit crazy stuff coming out of Trump's mouth. That day in the hospital my dad and I discussed how surprised we both were at Trump's bravery after he was shot at and was bleeding from the ear - and we both said that moment of bravery would win him huge points with constituents on both sides. I remember one of the last things I said to my dad was that "there is a very fine line between crazy and brave, and Trump was right on that line the day he was almost shot in the head". My dad laughed and said I was right.

That was the last face to face conversation we had together. Less than a week later my dad had to go on a ventilator, and then I never saw him conscious again.

When Trump won in 2016, my dad was a source of comfort for me. He told me then we'd be okay, we'd get through. And he was the one person I knew I could commiserate with when the scariness of politics became a little too much. 

When Trump won the election this past November, I had never felt more alone in my life. My dad is the one person I wanted to talk to about it, the one person who could have comforted me, or just commiserated with me. He is the one person who I wanted to ask, "what does this mean for us? are we going to be okay?" Because he was smart, he was brave, and he was someone I knew I could trust in this dark and scary world. He was my protector. 

And now today, January 20, 2025, Trump is again being sworn into office, and my dad is gone. So much about that one sentence feels heavy and immensely unfair. All I can do now is take the lessons my dad taught me and try to be like him as best as I can - compassionate, brave, smart, level-headed, and realistic. I'll consider myself lucky if I am even an eighth as good of a person as he was. And most importantly, no matter what happens, I will never stop caring about basic human rights, I will never stop loving our great country, and I will never stop missing my dad. Never.