When Dad is a One Percenter
by A Daughter
My father, who is 85, grew up believing that all Americans can succeed through hard work and education, and that people who didn’t weren’t trying hard enough. He still believes that.
I grew up with the same belief, but its implicit promise of reward based on merit didn’t turn out to be true for my generation or its children. Our economic circumstances have diverged so radically from those of my father’s, you’d think we belonged to different families.
Dad is representative of wealthy, very conservative 1 percenters. A lifelong Republican whose hero is Ronald Reagan, Dad believes unions and the protections they offer workers “destroy incentive.”
I joined a union, when one was available, because it won a guarantee of 12 hours off between shifts.
Dad belongs to some of the most expensive and exclusive private golf clubs in the country. Women still aren’t allowed at one of them.
I belong to the library.
Dad and his wife have pared down from three houses to one, a five-bedroom, three-story, luxury house with a mother-in-law apartment and a guest or servant’s apartment, inside a gated community in one of the country’s most expensive zip codes. Before he retired, he also had a chalet in Colorado and a mansion on the Intracoastal Waterway in Florida.
I live in a small, two-bedroom house that could fit inside the first floor of his with room to spare all around, in a poor town plagued for decades by joblessness, which made it affordable for me.
Dad started his career in the late 1940s, during an economic boom. Much of his working life coincided with a robust economy whose opportunities were largely reserved for white males.
My working life, which began in the 1970s, coincided with stagnant wages, steeply rising living costs, lower earnings for women and massive job cuts.
Dad and his wife own three luxury cars. I drive a used car that had 40,000 miles on it when I bought it.
Dad has his suits custom made by a tailor from Hong Kong who comes to the United States to measure his clients and show them swatches.
On the rare occasions I buy clothing, it’s usually from a discount outlet or Costco.
Dad acquired an extra $300,000 in cash from the private golf clubs he has belonged to for some 50 years. When a member hits his 80th birthday, he told me, the clubs return the hefty initiation fees they charged when the member first joined.
I saved up $10,000 in an IRA.
When Dad wanted to cut expenses, he sold vacation houses worth millions. When I had to cut expenses, I gave up health insurance, cable TV and a cell phone.
When Dad buys something, his thinking stops at, “I can afford it.” When I buy something, I question whether my community, my country and even the world can afford the consequences of millions of choices like mine.
Dad assumed that I would get married and be supported by a husband. I assumed that I would have a successful career and support myself. Neither of us foresaw a future for me of just scraping by.
Fortunately, I don’t envy Dad his wealth or his lifestyle. My choices, if I had his kind of money, would be very different. But I do resent the emotional burden of keeping his beliefs about the huge difference in our circumstances from coming between us. This includes ignoring, or downplaying as a joke, the hysteria-ridden, far-right rants he forwards to me. The last one compared President Obama to Marx and Hitler – simultaneously.
His mink-lined cocoon of luxurious comfort has nurtured a sense of entitlement based on the illusion that he earned all of it through his own efforts. Class, race, gender, and economic trends had nothing to do with it.
The other side of that coin is the belief that people who aren’t rich and successful weren’t as talented or didn’t work as hard. It’s a judgment I have to push aside from myself every time I see him.
During the past eight years of involuntary unemployment or subsistence on low-wage jobs, as my savings dwindled and it was obvious I was in trouble, he said nothing.
Meanwhile, my mother and my sister, fellow 99 percenters, have surreptitiously slipped twenty-dollar bills into my purse or coat pocket to cover the gas and tolls whenever I drove to see them. They aren’t rich, they don’t want to be paid back and they don’t wait to be asked. They understand.
My father has never asked whether I needed help. .
Dad understands that ideas he has believed in all his life, what he thinks are the reasons for his success, are under attack. I’ve tried to keep our disagreement about that at arm’s length when it comes to him.
But it’s become impossible to ignore this truth: that policies based on the beliefs of 1 percenters like my father have hurt me and hundreds of millions of others.
Our national family suffers from the same kind of disconnect and discord. If my experience is any indicator, the 1 percenters will never acknowledge that the playing field needs leveling, that the rules must be unrigged and some of the financial burdens shifted to those best able to bear them.
So, painful as this may be, we must understand how personal a fight this is, and prepare for invective. Some of us also will endure the ache of estrangement, especially acute when sharing a holiday dinner table with someone you’ve loved a long time, someone unwilling to help bridge a widening gulf even in his own family.
To protect her father’s privacy, the writer has asked that her name not be published.