We can all learn from my Dad's Experience

I was lucky to get tickets to take my Dad to Bill 

Clintons' First Inauguration in 1993.  We attended 

a black-tie ball at the Kennedy Center, then, the next 

day were lucky again, having won a drawing to visit 

The White House, meeting both the 

Clinton and Gore families.

Dad was lucky.

Sure, he didn’t think he was when he was pronounced dead at birth during the 1918 flu epidemic, resurrected when his brother dropped him on the floor and he began to cry.  

And he didn’t think he was lucky when he ran away from his Trenton, New Jersey, home at age 11, tired of the daily spankings at Catholic School and lack of hope throughout our country when the Great Depression put millions out on the street. 

Not lucky when, in March 1933, at age 14 he found himself alone in Washington DC listening to the first Inaugural Address of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and not when dug into foxholes at Iwo Jima and Okinawa just hoping to survive.

But he was lucky.

My Dad, Steve Obduskey, passed away last month in Pueblo as a youthful 88-year-old who always said he “hoped to get old, some day.”

He was an awfully smart guy with a memory better than mine, who paid attention to politics.  He understood how important actions our lawmakers undertake impact the common man, and he encouraged everyone he met to read more than the headlines and listen to more than sound bytes.  

As the media grew and changed, and “news” became a corporate profit center instead of the 4^th Estate our forefathers envisioned, he watched in horror as our citizenry fell deeper and deeper into apathy and a lack of involvement.  He became a CSPAN addict, who saw what really takes place in Washington rather than what is reported in the corporate media.

Dad was a lifelong Democrat. 

He was alarmed when my return to Graduate School for an MBA pushed the values he’d advocated all of his life up against the profit motives I was “taught” that treated people less like valued members of a society and more like disposable tissues.

He understood, too, how Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party began to dismantle unions and education, and how programs built by FDR to actually create and support a middle class – OUR middle class – were being hijacked by Republicans and the wealthy elite using tools out of the playbook of German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels who wrote in 1934:  “One need only consider the revolutionary impact of the invention of radio, which gave the spoken word true mass effectiveness. The technology of propaganda has changed greatly in recent years, but the art of propaganda has remained the same.”

Karl Rove has assumed that role today.

Lucky Day 2000.  We won the right to purchase Super Bowl
tickets through a drawing with the National Football League.
We went to Atlanta to see the St. Louis Rams beat the
Tennessee Titans in a last minute thriller.

Dad knew how the GOP has turned us into a nation of fearful lemmings who sit idly by while propagandists in power the past six years have dismantled our Constitution using the words like “patriotism and victory,” or phony issues like “gay marriage and flag burning.”  They distract while borrowing money from China to give tax cuts to the wealthy or by slipping military recruiter access to your child’s school records into “No Child Left Behind.”  

Meanwhile, only the less-wealthy sacrifice by soon to be $4/gallon fuel prices and higher health-care costs top-spun by record profits and government support of those who fund their campaigns.

Dad always said “there’s no substitute for experience,” and I note that when he died, there were only 22 registered voters in all of Park County with more experience than he.  We can all learn from his experience.

Dad “got it,” and so have I.  From his post on the high ground at Ft Logan National Cemetery, I know he’s smiling.


This column was originally published in the April 27, 2007 edition of The Flume, the paper of record for Park County, Colorado.  The monthly column is titled "Democratically Speaking"