Opinion: Four Father’s Day lessons for the DFL from my dad

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

A bit of friendly counsel for DFLers as they reach out to workers and small-business owners across the state — from my dad.

Born in north Minneapolis in 1918, a short walk from where Floyd B. Olson grew up, Dad made his home, from birth to passing, between Lyndale and Vincent Avenues. A Marine medic in World War II, he was hurled halfway around the world, but came back to the North Side. As a child I heard him use the Yiddish phrase “proste menschen” as a compliment. As an adult I learned that the expression, meaning “plain/common people,” was typically taken as an insult. My father saw it differently. He deeply valued the common ground, spatial and spiritual, that he shared with other unpretentious working folk.

This sensibility was reflected in his assertion that all of Hebrew Scripture came down to: Remember, you were a slave in Egypt, and it was bitter. Having tasted that bitterness, God forbid you’d serve it up to anyone else. Our mom learned that lesson from a local grouch. Harassed by neighborhood children, she heard the woman exclaim, “You know, when you pinch me, it hurts me too!” Dad attributed the lesson to Scripture. Mom, to a North Side grump.

Lesson 1: Working people and small-business folks stand on broad stretches of common ground — ground shared with many a neighbor intent on pinching their way up in the world. DFLers can do better. Pinch-dependent politics is beneath the dignity of Dad’s proste menschen. We may not always understand where someone is coming from, or appreciate their style, but we all know something about hurting.

My childhood buddies repeatedly found themselves in serious discussions with my father. Exchanges could get a little heated, but some friends may have found it easier to argue with my dad than with theirs, as he was ready to meet them where they were … usually, at our dinner table. They respected the guy with the coffee mug, and even when exchanges came to “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” they knew they had a place at the table.

Lesson 2: “You have a place at the Democratic table” must come with the understanding that it’s the case even if we don’t fully grasp all the particulars of one another’s experience and perspective. What must be understood is that the social and economic power of the advantaged imposes a shared set of socioeconomic needs, and responsibilities, on those not sharing in those advantages, young and old. That stays on the table.

Dad use to say he liked the smell of sweat. If so, I’m certain he could appreciate Lincoln’s distinctive reading of the biblical in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” Strange, indeed. Our faces are different, but sweat is sweat. Thy face, thy sweat, thy bread.

Lesson 3: Market economies may have some virtues, but their systemic camouflaging of privilege wrung from others’ sweat is a noxious pollutant of public spaces. At the very least, those who sweat for a living earn a decisive say in how the loaf is sliced and shared. From the New Deal through the War on Poverty, the Democratic Party successfully conveyed that this was implicit in the name “Democratic.”

My father’s refuge as a boy was the Sumner Public Library. A poor North Side kid, he was drawn to its expanses, physical and intellectual, and the common ground it offered, with neighbors and the world. An incessant reader, he developed a deep regard for education and expertise, along with the belief that learning leads to responsibilities, not privilege.

Lesson 4: “All politics are local” means, first of all: “If I can’t stop worrying about my own day-to-day, how can I start thinking about other whens and wheres for which I also bear some responsibility?” A responsive Democratic Party will be well-attuned to the bread-and-butter/brick-and-mortar needs of its constituents, while not turning its back on the larger world and the long view. Bitter is bitter, anywhere, anytime and “common ground” isn’t just a metaphor. We earthlings have an Earth to care for.

It’s been about 40 years since Dad died. In the months before his passing he wrote his life story (in pencil). In the closing paragraph he reflected on the “golden rule,” and then, in a postscript: “… I needed the full help and cooperation of my fellow man, not only to provide all the needs of life — food, shelter, health, etc. Without their help and cooperation, none of these were securable on their own. Therefore, the better off they were, the better off I was going to be.”

I don’t think Paul Wellstone knew my father …

Earl Schwartz, of Falcon Heights, is retired from the Hamline University faculty.