This article was featured in The Bulletin (Philadelphia-area newspaper) on 9/6/09. You can read the online newspaper version here, or check out the print column each week.
My father grew up in a poor section of Southern California, a place where few made it out, and most followed in the footsteps of their parents. He was the son of immigrants, both uneducated, and was often made fun of for his accent. He quickly learned to fight—sometimes for protection, many times for pride. His father was a bus driver, drank heavily, and gambled on weekends; his mother sometimes worked as a seamstress.
My grandfather never attended my dad’s sports games, and was hardly around when my father grew up. For some reason, however, he left one lasting impression: He told my dad, “You need to go to college.” Determined to make it out, my dad decided to push himself to fulfill his father’s desire. Through hard work, he became a starter on three varsity sports teams, graduated at the top of his class, and was eventually inducted into his high school hall of fame.
He was accepted into UCLA—he made it out.
Years later, after a few twists and turns in life, my dad again found himself at the bottom. He had gone to seminary to become a pastor, following a passion for his faith. Two years out of seminary, however, the church where he was associate pastor fell on hard financial times. Attendance dwindled, and my dad was laid off.
He had a two year-old daughter, my sister, and was struggling to keep the family afloat. Then he had a defining moment: Standing in a grocery store holding my sister, he picked up a piece of fruit and piece of cheese. He couldn’t afford to buy both. He looked at my sister, and back at his hands and said, “I’m never going to have to make this decision again.” And he never did.
In order to make some money, and despite the fact he had a Master’s degree, he took the first job he could find—as a door-to-door vacuum salesman. He outworked everyone in the company, and was quickly the top salesman for the region. He still has the trophy (a gold man in a suit holding a vacuum) as a reminder of how he got to where he is. For his performance, he was promoted to office manager.
His management experience opened the door for his next job as a manager at construction company Ingersoll-Rand. From there he was offered a job at Levi Strauss & Co., helping run the credit and collections department. He eventually worked his way up to Vice President, and led the development of the first electronic supply chain management system for the industry. After 20 years at Levi’s, he became President and COO of UCCnet, an offshoot of the company that created the bar code. For his work, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 by VICS, a national organization of senior industry executives. Throughout, he appeared in major business publications like Forbes magazine.
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Growing up, let’s just say I wasn’t allowed not to work hard. Excellence was more than a value, it was an expectation. If I failed, it was never going to be for lack of hard work.
In large part, my dad believed, success was a direct outcome of the work you put in. He is living proof that it doesn’t matter where you start, only where you choose to end up. And that is the beautiful thing about our country.
The American Dream is that anyone can become almost anything through hard work and personal industry. Our founders saw profound beauty in “Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that pairing was not accidental. Liberty means you are free to choose your own outcomes; pursuit means government will not keep you from it.
And yet, with growing tax rates and expansive government, some now desire a massive redistribution of wealth. They couch their ideas in “fairness,” that somehow those who have more than others did not work for what they have. They clamor for government handouts and bailouts, forgetting that in order to pay for some, government must necessarily take from others. They place their hope in government, shedding notions of American individualism and strength.
There are often stark differences in where people begin; there does not have to be in where people end up. That is a product of choice. Not everyone will attain to success, and many will simply give up. But that is the reality of a free society. The beautiful reality of freedom is that anyone can succeed; the harsh reality is that some will not.
The alternative is a government controlled society, where liberty is distained for its “unequal” results. That experiment has failed thousands of times before, yet many still believe utopia is attainable. They fail to recognize that their grasp for perfection comes at the expense of liberty. Conservatism places great faith in man; liberalism places great faith in government.
I am deeply patriotic because of the opportunities that our country, through freedom and liberty, afforded my father. That legacy demands we preserve the foundational principles that have, and always will, bring us such great strength.
-Matt Benchener is the founder of TruPolitics.net and a candidate for Newtown Township Supervisor. Learn more at www.benchener09.com.
September 3, 2009 at 10:10 am |
Matt,
Have you ever considered sending a copy of this to the current administration and to each member of the congress?
Thanks for writing this.
September 6, 2009 at 11:54 am |
Matt – Thanks for sharing that article on your dad’s struggles and accomplishments and how hard work always paid off. I am going to make this a must read for my sons! Gail Thibodeau
September 11, 2009 at 12:09 am |
[...] pondering: response to, “Why I’m Conservative.” This is a response to a post from the blog, trupolitics. It’s written by Matt Benchener, who is a very good friend of [...]
September 14, 2009 at 8:39 am |
Matt,
I know Paul Benchener; Paul Benchener is a friend of mine; and you … Well, I can’t complete that sentence with the same destructive power Lloyd Bentsen used to skewer Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate (“I knew John Kennedy; John Kennedy was a friend of mine; and you’re no John Kennedy”). I can’t do that because you, Matt Benchener, are Paul Benchener, in every positive way I can conceive. You may not have pulled yourself up “by your bootstraps,” as your father did, but I know you worked as hard as he did, and I fully expect you to achieve great things in your life, as has he. Having said all that gooey, sentimental stuff, I have to take issue with the conclusion you drew from a microscopic examination of your father’s admirable life.
I think a son could just as easily have decided to become a liberal based on his examination of Paul Benchener’s life. That would necessitate the son recognizing, as I’m sure you already do, Matt, that Paul Benchener is an extraordinary individual, intelligent, motivated, honest, diligent, loyal — a combination of human qualities not many of his peers, well- or poorly born, possess. Your conclusion that our government shouldn’t have to offer individuals “a hand up,” as I understand you, because Paul Benchener proves by his example that anyone can make it without government assistance, emerges from what I would call extremely shaky reasoning; indeed, the facts themselves contradict your conclusion. It seems more logical to note that since there are so few individuals like Paul, many of them (most?) probably need some assistance even to begin to have a chance to live the kind of life Paul has lived.
Matt, you write, “In large part, my dad believed, success was a direct outcome of the work you put in. He is living proof that it doesn’t matter where you start, only where you choose to end up. And that is the beautiful thing about our country.” No real, red-blooded American citizen could disagree with that sentiment. I think it would be fair, however, to point out the flaw in your phrase, “…where you choose to end up.” No one “chooses” to end up on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder; it is a terribly insulting suggestion — aimed, it seems to me, at millions of our fellow citizens who, in spite of laboring hard all of their lives, remain at or below the poverty line — that these folks ended up where they are because they were not willing to work hard enough to achieve greatness. The hard-edged judgment that such an individual could have become anything he or she wanted to become is patently, even cruelly, unfair, and it is untrue.
You also write, “The American Dream is that anyone can become almost anything through hard work and personal industry.” That is, I agree, one vital, living aspect of the American Dream. It is necessary to remember that it is, after all, a dream, one that is far-too-rarely realized. Paul Benchener realized that aspect of his dream. We should congratulate and applaud him for the uniqueness of his achievement, but clearly we should not use his life example to justify adopting a society-wide decision to deny assistance to those who do not have his peculiar set of human qualities.
So, what should we do? I support your implied suggestion that organizations outside of the government should be the agencies of assistance in our free society; it would be an ideal circumstance that we would be, through private contributions, our brothers’ keepers. And there are undoubtedly thousands of organizations that do provide such assistance. If, in short, we were a truly charitable people, there would be much less need for government welfare programs. The current sad fact of the matter is, we are not, as a whole, charitable toward our fellow citizens — or, at least, we are not charitable enough. Indeed, the tendency has been that the wealthier an American becomes, the less he or she is likely to give to those in need. Whether through government aid or the assistance of NGOs, we Americans have a moral obligation to give folks a hand up. Today, the only way all of our brothers and sisters are going to receive that assistance is through government programs.
Finally, you write, “Conservatism places great faith in man; liberalism places great faith in government.” What “men” should we have faith in, Matt? The bankers? Wall Street wheelers and dealers? Corporate executives? I’m sure those aren’t the “men” you had in mind. Name me five influential private citizens in the history of this country who could match this list of government employees: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Colin Powell.
I believe liberalism is the social construct that most consistently and clearly emphasizes the value of the individual. Liberalism is based on the belief that we as a society should not leave a single individual behind; conservatism suggests that the weak should fall, unaided.
The Declaration of Independence does feature the words you included in your essay: “…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” I would agree with you, Matt, that these sentiments are central to our American-ness. The next half of the phrase is, I believe, equally valuable: “…that to insure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Governments ensure individual rights, including, presumably, the aforementioned, “…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Does that not imply that we all share the responsibility — through our government — for the welfare of our fellow Americans?