My father has been a Democrat his entire life and I’m still trying to figure this one out. My father is a gun-loving, meat-eating redneck from deep in the bowels of Maine. He enjoys hunting, fishing, and baseball (although he rarely finds the time to hunt or fish anymore). He worked for Colt Firearms for 35 years until his retirement in ‘99. He never made much over $30K per year, but without a high school diploma, his choices were pretty limited.

This is the man who raised me, and on more than one occasion, I’ve gone with him hunting, fishing and firing. In fact, I’ve probably fired more guns than the average conservative gun enthusiast and I can probably tell you more about the history of the M-16 A1 assault rifle than the average card carrying member of the NRA.

Dealing with my father, no one would ever guess he was a Democrat. I remember one time, I brought a friend of mine home who had a nose ring with a chain that went from his nose to his ear. My father warned him that if he ever came to the house with that stuff in his face again, he would be thrown out. This is how my father is: very, very old school. So you probably can imagine how the conversation went when my sister told him that she was a lesbian.

My dad flat out stopped talking to her, and a couple of years went by before they reconciled. At least that’s how I remember it. I don’t dare ask him any details about it now that so much time has passed and I can’t really ask my sister because we have lost touch ever since she moved out west. My father’s refusal to accept her sexuality had a lot more to do with his generational upbringing than anything else. He learned a lot from that experience, and I’m sure if he could go back in time, he would handle it differently.

But while my father had many socially conservative traits, he was always a big fan of unions. In fact, when the UAW at Colt went on a four-year strike, which was one of the longest running labor strikes in American history (wikipedia, colt.com) my father never crossed the picket line. When the press covered stories about the picket lines, my dad would often show up in pictures with his guitar in hand and a big smile on his face. He did his best to entertain the crowd; something he’s done his entire life.

Finally, when money got too tight, my father did what he had to in order to put food on the table. Most notably, he worked for a company called Columbia Manufacturing in Columbia, Connecticut where he endured the kind of verbal abuse that’s illegal in most current corporations. When my father finally told me the stories of abuse that he experienced at Columbia Manufacturing, I was angered to the point of wanting to take action, but I quickly realized that it wouldn’t make me feel any better to beat the shit out of someone almost as old as my father.

The strike and its backlash on my family had very little effect on me at the time because I was only 11 years old and had no idea what to make of it. All I knew was that my parents always made me feel special, they always had food on the table and I always received gifts during Christmas. It wasn’t until 22 years later, as I write this, that I realized the hero my father truly is. Not because he worked so hard to keep food on the table, but because he did it without hesitation or reproach. He didn’t want to burden me with the truths about those incredibly tough times; he just did what he had to do.

I’ve always thought of my father as a simple man who likes beer and tells inappropriate jokes, but the truth is that he is a hero who has made sacrifice after sacrifice for the ones he loves. I’m lucky to have him.

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Cross-posted at Thought Mechanics.