Originally published 5/6/2010 on Momaha.com Meal time is the most stressful time in our house. Part of it is because I am marginally qualified to be a cook. Most of it is because our children are piranhas. As soon as I open the fridge, the children come running into the kitchen. I don’t know how they hear me open the fridge. They can’t seem to hear me when they’re standing right next to me and I’m yelling at them to clean up their room but somehow they can hear the fridge open from the basement while screaming and chasing each other. They burst into the kitchen and begin scavenging off the counters. Raw hamburger, uncooked noodles, and unpeeled oranges all try to go into their mouths. They don’t care. They just want to eat and aren’t interested in waiting for that inconvenient cooking part. After the five hundred and fifty-seventh time of telling them to wait until I COOK dinner, they simply just move to the table. I guess they figure as soon as they sit down at the table, their food will be ready. That’s what they’ve seen on Star Trek (one of my favorite shows that I have brainwashed them into enjoying). When one of the characters uses a “food replicator” the prepared food appears instantly. Problem is, that’s NOT how it works in the 21st century! I have to brown the hamburger, boil the noodles and peel the oranges. This takes about 20 minutes. Five minutes in they can no longer restrain themselves and now swarm in for the kill. Chairs start being pushed up to the counters in an attempt to reach the tasty tidbits. They begin dashing at any crumb that is unfortunate enough to have fallen to the floor. The whining and complaining of feeling like they are “starving to deaf” reaches a fever pitch. And just an hour ago they devoured a bag of pretzels! Now these piranhas begin to smell blood in the water. They realize that all this nagging and complaining and generally just getting in the way has worn my patience thin. From experience, they know that to keep them from eating ME, I am going to have to start feeding them something. I lob in an orange slice to each of them with the vain hope that it will satisfy them long enough for me to finish making their dinner, but, now that they have gotten a taste, they attack. “Dad can I have another orange!” I hear with increasing desperation. There is nothing left for me to do but to continue to satisfy this feeding frenzy until dinner is finally served. But once dinner is served a strange calm comes over them. The voraciousness of their appetites has waned and they are content to casually gnaw on their food as they talk, giggle and sing. Right before my eyes they have turned into sloths! Finally, about 30 minutes later, they are done. They clear the table and I clean up the kitchen thankful to have survived another day in piranha-infested waters… Until five minutes later when they beg for a snack. I’m going to cry on August 18, 2020. It’s an emotional response that has been building for over 17 years. In 2002 our first child was born. She emerged screaming. My wife was on the operating table and exhausted from over 24 hours of labor and then a c-section. She kissed our daughter and the nurses took the screaming gooey cone-headed child to the warming table to clean her up. She kept on screaming. I stood there with all this activity around me feeling like I was in the way. My wife was the experienced one. She had cared for her younger sisters and babysat countless other kids. She knew what to do. I never held a baby before. I planned to learn from my wife but it occurred to me in that moment that she couldn’t teach me. She was lying on a table getting her insides put back inside her. I had to step up. I had to be Dad. I went over to our screeching child and muttered a few words. From the birthing classes, I remembered that babies love to suck on something to soothe themselves so I offered her the ring finger of my right hand. She immediately calmed down. She immediately grabbed ahold of my heart. But, in August, I will have to let her go. She will be attending college at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. I’m thrilled for her to find a college she loves that is not terribly far from home. I’m sad she will be going. For almost 18 years, she has been with me every day. I have helped teach her to walk, talk and ride a bike. I have been there after her surgery to separate her webbed toes and at her side in the hospital after she fell off a cliff in Yellowstone National Park. I have cheered her on stage and at cross country meets. I have been with her at her best and her worst. She has taught me so much too. She has taught me how to love unconditionally and how to laugh uncontrollably. She has been by my side when I have been depressed. She always knows how to see the good in everything and everyone. I am so proud of the woman she is becoming. She is so confident, responsible and intelligent. I know she will love college and continue to grow. So many lives will be made brighter from meeting her. It’s just… I’m going to miss her. So, when we say our goodbyes at Iowa on August 18, 2020, all of the feelings I have stored inside me will overflow and the tears will slide down my cheeks. He was a brash New Yorker who was not afraid to speak his mind. He was arrogant and rude. He was a master at bending the media to his will. Both his enemies and friends feared his unapologetic wrath. Anyone who dared to oppose him soon regretted it when reading his sharp words the next day. He wanted a lasting legacy, craved notoriety and frequently considered becoming President of the United States. His ambition could not be contained. He was constantly battling rumors about his finances, character and philandering. He strenuously denied all but one adulterous affair which became very well known and publicized. For anyone else, such a scandal would have ruined his career, but not for him. His influence in New York and in nationwide politics never waned. His reputation concerned him the most. He cultivated it. He defended it. He died for it. No one influenced him but his own ideas which he defended vigorously. As a result, he often did not do what was expected. He agreed to a compromise that was against the best interests of his beloved New York City so he could achieve something he believed was in the best interest of the entire country. He was accused of fraud and, to disprove the accusation, admitted publicly to being bribed to keep his wife from knowing about a sensational affair. He was asked to endorse a fellow New Yorker for President but instead endorsed a Virginian who was vocally opposed to him for a decade because he believed the Virginian to be the better candidate. Everything about him was scandalous. Everything about him made our country better. Everything about him is what our country needs now. He never did satisfy his hunger for the Presidency. It was another similarly brash New Yorker over 200 years later who did. While Donald Trump has a lot of similarities, he does not match the integrity of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton always put his country first. He had a set of beliefs and never wavered from them. His beliefs made him many enemies and certainly destroyed his chances to be President but they were firmly rooted in creating the strongest democracy ever conceived. With the hindsight of history, there is no doubt Hamilton was one of the most important founding fathers and worthy of admiration by current politicians. The politics of the Revolution and the first 20 years of the United States were brutal. Like today, elected officials were in one of two camps (Federalists led by Hamilton and Democratic Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson) who were tribal and unwilling to compromise. They despised each other and fought bitterly. Hamilton was no saint but he was always more interested in the bigger picture. Whatever further strengthened the country was more important than political expediency to Hamilton. He believed creating and sustaining a strong government would cement his legacy which he cared about more than anything else. In order to get Congress to agree to assume the debts of all states after the Revolution and create a central bank, Hamilton sold out his home state of New York by agreeing to support the capitol of the country being located in Virginia rather than in New York City. While doing this angered many northerners, it secured a strong financial position for the country. Even Jefferson, who viciously opposed Hamilton, would agree years later that Hamilton was right about the importance of a central bank. When accused of defrauding the government as Treasury Secretary, Hamilton admitted publicly to being bribed over an affair in order to keep it a secret which explained why he was paying a man in jail for taking money from Revolutionary War veterans. He was respected for his honesty even though it ended his opportunity to be President and was extraordinarily painful for his wife, Eliza. When the election of 1800 ended in a tie between Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and Arron Burr of New York, it was Hamilton who convinced several delegates to vote in favor of Jefferson. Hamilton and Jefferson were always on opposite sides and hated each other but Hamilton rose above politics to support the candidate he felt would be better for the country, rather than support a fellow New Yorker who would be indebted to him politically. All of these incidents were seen as scandalous. Hamilton did not choose what was best for him. He chose to do what was best for the country, believing his reputation and lasting legacy would be more secure by independent thought, bold action and an enduring future rather than what would be convenient, easy and immediately beneficial. Our politicians today are nothing like Hamilton. They are beholden to their party. They listen to polls instead of their conscience. They are untethered from the truth when it does not suit their personal or political party interests. They work more to convince us we do not see what we see instead of doing their duty to defend the Republic and the people they serve. Hamilton was arrogant and unapologetic. He vigorously defended his ideas, often making friends into enemies but he did what he felt was right and sacrificed tremendously for it. For this he was quite scandalous and achieved a legacy worthy of adulation today. We could use more of such scandalous leaders. |
Al WattsFather of 4, Husband, Catholic, Historian, published author, LGBTQ+ ally, runner, sports fan (he/him/his) Archives
May 2020
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