Oh Oh, Daddy is Home
In life, love and motorcycle maintenance, lack of leverage always proceeds punishment
As a young lad in elementary school, I often found myself sitting in a well-worn chair in Principal Lee's office. Habeas corpus did not exist in my school and my pleas for justice fell on deaf ears, most especially with my parents. Never was the number of times I convinced my restaurant running father and my teacher mother that my incarceration and punishment at school was unjust. Adults, from the perspective of youth in my day, always stuck together and "sparing the rod, spoils the child" was their daily mantra.
My fate was to take my punishment and move on in life. Elementary school-aged boys sent to the principal's office simply have no leverage. And lack of leverage always precedes punishment. But a date with Principal Lee was the last, not the first stop on my highway of errant adolescent decision making. Whatever events led me to his office were preceded by multiple wrong decisions, missed off-ramp opportunities to heed warnings that my behavior was inappropriate, so many good decisions not made that could have saved me a visit with that gruff and humorless school master.
Principal Lee was an authority figure from my youth. He held the power of punishment or leniency, but nothing more. I neither respected him, nor feared him. He was a mere cog in a machine hell-bent on matriculating young boys like me through an unwanted academic experience. I knew elementary school education in the 1970s was a recipe of forced captivity mixed with mundane futility sprinkled with a dash of free academic expression.
Young boys unwillingly inserted in public schools simply have no leverage to change their situation. Early schooling for this overactive young lad required the resilience and perseverance of Sisyphus as I was in a constant state of adversity with a system I detested yet could not change. Pushing that burdensome school "rock" uphill taught me perseverance in the face of daily suffering and that resiliency, not reactionary behavior was the pathway to gaining the leverage to improve my then lot in life.
There was, however, an authority figure of my youth that I did fear. He was my father. The phrase, "just wait, young man, until daddy comes home," held real teeth. This fear was no better played cinematically then in A Christmas Story when young Randy feared “daddy's going to kill Ralphie” after the Farkus fracas.
No young boy ever wants to come face to face with daddy when punishment is due. Because by the time, "wait until daddy comes home," was uttered, not only had I ignored every safe offramp on the highway of bad decisions, but I had also run out of pavement. At that stage of child rearing, the only leverage I relied upon was murder was illegal. Short of that fate, all other punishments were fair game.
The thing about "daddy coming home" is, right or wrong is not on the table. The fact that I got sent to the principal's office because I was caught in the act of defending innocence and virtue was immaterial to my case. Stomping the school yard bully who tortured smaller victims created a disturbance to learning and my recompense was with God, not Principal Lee. The same goes for any "wait until daddy comes home" scenario. Right or wrong was immaterial. My actions created a disturbance in "the force" and my father's role was not to judge, but to restore order - and restore order by any means possible.
As we get older and enter relationships at home and work, our punishment or reward is tied to our leverage within the system, not the actual actions we take. A salesperson who always exceed budgeted expectations but can never show up to work on time or file their reports correctly has more leverage in the system than a counterpart, who never misses a day of work, files reports on time but does not consistently make sales quotas. Leverage favors what the system wants, not individual valor.
In love and in life, when we find ourselves at the negotiation table with an adversary, our leverage in the situation matters far more than our moral stance. Our leverage in these situations is determined but the series of decisions we made up to that point. Did we position our business to prevail or fail in a negotiation is all that matters. Just like an attorney arguing a case before a jury, “When you have the facts on your side, pound the facts, when you have the law on your side, pound the law, and when you have neither, pound the table.”
Too often, we find ourselves underprepared for our negotiations and when that happens in business, we discuss the “blue sky” of grand, but unmet visions instead of empirical numbers. At home, the simple “yes” or “no” answer to, “did you take the garbage out” evolves into a treatise on the virtues of garbage removal when the task went unfulfilled.
It is when we find ourselves on the losing side of the negotiations that the excuses fly. It is at those moments that we blame our adversary or external conditions and not our poor choices or lack of preparedness. It was the traffic that caused the delay, not a lack of time management. It was the poor economy that scuttled my business deal, not poor planning to adjust my business model. We blame the "daddy" figure calling balls and strikes on these failures when all they represent is the manifestation of our poor planning or poor choices that led us to be on the downside of a negotiation.
Nowhere is that playing out bigger on a world stage then with President Trump right now. Half of the citizens of the United States and at least half of the countries on earth are getting a big dose of daddy Trump. As his DOGE team plows through the DC bureaucracy, his State Department mulls over current foreign affair shortcomings and his justice department reviews previous legal hubris and overreach, there are multitudes of individuals finding themselves on the downside of these investigations. Foreign leaders, with no leverage in negotiations, are blaming Trump instead of the many leadership missteps they made that put their countries in jeopardy. In these situations, like my run ins with Principal Lee, right or wrong, good or evil do not matter. Daddy is home and he is going to settle the matter. One either has the leverage to negotiate a better position or they will suffer the fate of their poor decision making.
President Trump was not installed to be the arbiter of good and evil, he was elected to restore order. For too long, poor decisions made by weak leaders led to societal fracturing and world-wide chaos. Order will be restored and right now, the “table pounders” are discovering the true meaning of leverage – or the lack thereof…
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