The Government

My dad was the smartest person I knew. He lived between the years 1910 and 2010, a time that saw the most innovative discoveries seen by man. Going down to the well to get your water to turning on the spigot for hot or cold; Horse drawn buggies to automobiles, to trains, to super jets; Oil lanterns to the first nighttime baseball game under the lights; Operator assisted telephone that you share with your neighbors to the cell phone that connected him with his son in law who was calling from Russia. Inventors like Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver. The list goes on.

As I said he was the smartest man I knew and he used this intelligence to move forward along with these changes, to learn to evolve as social norms did. He learned not to hold on to the past. During his lifetime, my dad went from believing separate but equal to his closest confidante being the black woman who cared for him at the end. I was proud to see him learn from his past and adjust his thinking to new things. Which gives more credence to the one thought he held for his whole life, one born of the many years he worked in the government. His lesson to me. Not one of the innovations he had seen were ever created by the Federal Government. Trust in the free market for your worldly needs, God for your spiritual and the Government for as little as you possibly can. He understood that the federal government was never meant to have as much power as it has today, and he saw it abuse this power every single day.