Above Photo: Danny Hiaphong and his father, 2011.
Parenthood Is A Part Of Life In Any Context.
However, The Experience Is Deeply Affected By The Forces Of Imperialism. Here’s Mine.
Let me indulge you with a Father’s Day story. Five years ago on June 10th, my father fell ill with a massive heart attack. He spent two weeks in the ICU before dying at the age of 69. That day changed my life forever. I was familiar with the commonness of death under U.S. imperialism, but never had it hit so close.
The loss of a parent or caregiver compels us to revisit our roots. After all, there are few people more influential on the trajectory of our lives than those who raise us. I was twenty-seven when my father died and only possessed a cursory understanding at that time of how his life influenced my own. Five years later and I am still figuring it out.
What I do know is that my father was raised with a keen awareness of suffering. He was raised in rural New Hampshire by parents who struggled with mental illness and addiction. He told stories with a smile on his face of moments when he felt neglected as a child, whether it was riding his bicycle as a mere toddler until he got lost or saving his sister from nearly drowning in frigid ice water. He hated wars after being drafted to join the U.S. invasion of Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. Drunken fellow soldiers and their superiors desperate for the war’s end nearly killed him with “friendly fire.” The Vietnam experience ingrained in him a deep cynicism toward the U.S. power structure. But as a child of the post-World War II era, he never did shake his loyalty to the Democratic Party.
My father’s preferred language was that of pain and sacrifice. He gave everything to protect his loved ones from the worst excesses of a society predicated upon violence and exploitation, even to those who hurt him. This included my mother. The two met in Boston after my father completed his undergraduate degree following the war in Vietnam. She was a young Vietnamese woman attending Boston University and he was a worker seeking more gainful employment after taking numerous low-wage jobs as a janitor and exterminator to survive.
Eventually they would marry and my father landed a federal union job at the Logan Airport in Boston that allowed them to start a family. My mother’s mental health declined markedly in the late 90s amid runaway neoliberalism, with some indications that Agent Orange poisoning potentially played a role. Economic hardship resulted from my mother’s frequent, unannounced spending episodes where she would leave the home for days and weeks at a time. Crippling debt threatened to destroy our livelihoods and break up the family. Through the pain and the stress of parasitic creditors feasting on my mother’s vulnerabilities, my father worked harder instead of choosing to separate. The words “time and a half” and “double overtime” were common in our household as my father worked well beyond his full-time hours just so there would be a fighter’s chance for my sister and I to attend college.
Economic distress takes its toll. Anger and confusion filled the household. My sister and I often wondered why our father just didn’t leave the situation and take us with him. For several years, the phone rang constantly with debt collectors seeking their loot. Longer work hours meant less time with us, so we relied on our peers and other adults to fill the gap. There is a saying in working class communities that it’s “the streets that raise you” and this was at least partially true for me.
My father learned at a young age that sacrifice for the family collective was worth far more than individual comfort. This had its contradictions. Family under capitalism is an economic arrangement meant to secure private property for the rich and reproduce the exploitation of the worker. That is how debt operated in our family. What kept us together was my father’s sacrifice for his children and his deep desire to “fix” any problems that arose, for better or for worse. But we couldn’t escape the consequences that the combination of economic insecurity and worsening mental health had on all of our lives.
They certainly had an impact on my father. His long hours, sometimes upward of 70 hours a week, led to undetectable health issues. His need to sacrifice for others led him to build new, co-dependent relationships characterized by similar levels of heartbreak. Irregular sleep, poor diet, overwork, and an off-and-on relationship with cigarettes shortened his life. He retired at the age of 67 and by that time had likely experienced more than a few smaller heart attacks according to images of his heart just prior to his death.
My father’s experience is consistent with the demographic of men, particularly white men, who are dying at alarming rates from “diseases of despair.” Addiction, suicide, and heart disease have caused a significant decline in life expectancy in the United States. However, the unemployment, underemployment, and war trauma that trigger such despair is often minimized or left out of the mainstream narrative. Facing up to them means confronting the racist and class roots of the United States. The United States remains an alienating and violent society dependent upon endless war. Black Americans and Indigenous peoples have been subject to devastating rates of premature death due to preventable illness, addiction, economic distress, and state repression for centuries.
U.S. imperialism is a global machinery of death and thus it would be too simplistic to credit my father with exposing me to this reality. What my father did do was expose me to an environment that would provide a rapid education into the perils of U.S. imperialism and an urgency to fight them. I witnessed the premature death of several Black peers in my youth and navigated the shame and pain of class society by building up a silent rage that was desperate to be unleashed. Working class life thus planted the seeds for my political development. Further experience and study nurtured those seeds into maturity.
Racism and economic hardship were the earliest catalysts of my journey toward Marxism and radical politics. The explosive growth of U.S. military adventurism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya to name just a few provided fertile ground for my activism and journalism to take an internationalist turn. Disillusionment with my own personal situation and the politics of liberalism placed me on a search for an alternative. It was in this search that I found Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon’s work, two recently deceased giants of the movement whom I consider political fathers in their own right.
Still, my father has been a major influence on my approach to political struggle. His sacrifice for loved ones demonstrated that love need not be conditional. His patience with those who suffer taught me that contradictions among the people must be addressed collaboratively rather than antagonistically. He also taught me that sacrifice and patience have their limits. When these limits are not recognized, the consequences can be disastrous.
Imperialism doesn’t just steal resources and exploit labor for super profits. It also steals lives, and a lot of them. On this Father’s Day, we must remember the millions of people; fathers, mothers, and their children included, who have perished from the bombs, drone strikes, and weapons of death deployed by the U.S. military state in all corners of the global. We must keep in our minds and hearts the tens of thousands who have died around the world from U.S. sanctions, and the thousands more who have died from or been tortured by the U.S. policing and mass incarceration regime. And we cannot forget about the fathers and caregivers of the movement such as Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, and Julian Assange whose lives are at risk of death or permanent exile due to the contributions they’ve made and continue to make to the liberation of the people from imperialism’s machinery of death.
We must also remember that it is the exploited and the oppressed who make history. The experiences of ordinary people like our parents, friends, and community members steer us onto the path of class struggle. Frantz Fanon remarked in Wretched of the Earth that “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” Ho Chi Minh wrote the following poem titled Word-Play in his prison diaries:
People who come out of prison can build up the country.
Misfortune is a test of people’s fidelity.
Those who protest at injustice are people of true merit.
When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.
I am grateful to my father for playing a key role in the discovery of my mission to protest the injustice of imperialism’s machinery of death through journalism and for putting me on a path in life that channels misfortune into the development of solidarity and revolutionary love with anyone engaged in class struggle. I am also grateful to all of the “fathers” and “caregivers” of the movement who have laid the foundations for my own political development, which in retrospect is nothing but a small particle of snow in the avalanche that is the world historic movement for socialism and liberation.