The Brainwashing of My Dad by Jen Senko

Author:Jen Senko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

* CHAPTER 10 *

The Return of Dad

My parents were getting older and started feeling like they could no longer take care of their house and huge yard. A retirement community seemed to be the perfect solution, so they packed up and moved once again. Somehow during the move, my dad’s radio broke. He put it in the garage, where he planned to fix it one day, but he never got around to it. After the move, there were other things to take care of, and the radio fell down his to-do list. Without the radio, there were no Limbaugh lunches, and without Rush Limbaugh dominating the kitchen, my mom started eating in there with my dad again. My parents went back to chatting. And just as quickly as Limbaugh had taken over my father’s life, the talk radio host disappeared from my parents’ house.

Another miracle occurred shortly after the move when the old TV in the kitchen conked out and my parents got a new one. My mom programmed the remotes for the new TV. She placed stickies all over them with little instructions on how to operate them. If my parents happened not to be eating together, my dad, not wanting to bother figuring out how to use the new remotes, ended up watching whatever news show Mom had left on. And she never watched Fox News.

Life moved forward. One day, my dad was in a lot of pain; it turned out he had kidney stones, so he went to the hospital for a week. While he was there, my mother became worried that his email was piling up and taking up space on his slow-running, ancient computer. I happened to be visiting that week to help out. She asked me if I could delete some of Dad’s nonpersonal emails to save space. I found hundreds of right-wing political emails in his inbox.

As fast as I deleted them, the emails just continuously kept coming. Eventually, I told Mom it was pointless to try to keep up. So she decided that she would go into Dad’s email herself and unsubscribe him from as many email lists as she could. As she went along unsubscribing and seeing more of these messages, she then got the idea of subscribing him to some of her more moderate and even liberal political emails. When my dad came back home, he just read whatever was in his inbox, seemingly not noticing or caring about the shift in messaging.

We finally began experiencing peace in the family. My dad was mellowing out; the anger he had been experiencing for years was eroding. We hadn’t noticed when he stopped, but we certainly did notice that he was once again whistling or singing his Polish and Ukrainian tunes, smiling, and enjoying afternoon tea with my mom. He stopped lashing out; he stopped sending those angry, fearful emails that said Obama was born in Kenya. Even from his home across the country in Oregon, my brother Greg could tell there had been a change in Dad.

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