My father used to care about the environment until right-wing-conservative media changed him.
As a kid, he wanted to protect the ocean for my children’s children to still listen to humpback whales sing along the shoreline of Alaska, to swim around colorful coral reefs in Australia and to lay on sandy beaches as the sun rises on the horizon.
Now, he firmly agrees with President Donald Trump’s order to reopen the offshore pipelines in California without regulation approvals. These pipelines haven’t operated since May 2015 when one of them burst and over 120,000 gallons of oil were spilled into the ocean.
So, I guess my father has lost interest in my children’s children’s future. Maybe his plea to save the environment changed because I don’t want to have kids.
Or maybe it’s because he’s allowed an ideology to brainwash him into believing oil is still the greatest resource for America’s future.
My father used to be one of my greatest inspirations.
He’s a conservative Republican, and I’m his progressive daughter. While we haven’t always seen eye to eye, he instilled in me the ability to debate with others respectfully and still love them afterward.
Research and fact-checking were important to him, and he taught how it was integral to never allow politics to sway me away from my love of nature.
But ever since 2016 when Trump was first in office, I’ve watched as he’s lost all the morals which made my dad great.
Now, all he wants is to have a cheap price tag on oil, even if it means destroying the earth, the very beauty he spent so much time teaching me to respect while growing up.
Some of the greatest memories I have with my father are of him explaining how the world works.
My parents divorced when I was 2. So, while my mom told me the rain was God’s tears, my dad boiled a pot of water, put a lid on top and showed me how the water cycle actually worked.
He taught me to be kind to bees as we ran through fields of flowers at our favorite park when I was a kid, and it’s now a gas station. And when I bring up to him how this upsets me, instead of mourning the loss of our flower filled memory, he argues we needed that gas station on this side of the highway.
Outside digging up worms, he could show me the differences in the species we’d find. As we laid in the grass bird watching, he was the first to explain how their four-chambered heart was the same as ours.
And today, when I tell him I’m scared for the planet he taught me to love, he says I’m listening to the wrong people. He believes the planet is fine and that liberals make us feel we must change how we live as part of their woke agenda, when, in reality, nothing is wrong.
He only drinks water from plastic bottles. When I try to tell him how terrible it is, not only for the environment but also for water conservation, he reminds me of the old experiment we did to explain the water cycle.
Water will always be available because of the rain, and liberals are the reason plastic causes fear. When I counter his argument with the fact toxic rain exists and is becoming an issue, he says the liberals are using their weather machines to do that.
The problem isn’t my dad is a Republican conservative. If it were, I wouldn’t have all these wonderful memories of him that I do.
The problem is my dad allowed extremists to make him believe taking care of the earth is woke propaganda.
