Strength, Weakness, and Healing

A Story About My Father

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on whether or not God saved Donald Trump’s life when a shooter attempted to take the former president’s life at a campaign rally. The essay ended up being one of my favorite things I’ve written for the Window Light newsletter. When I began writing it, though, I had intended to also include some thoughts on President Joe Biden’s deliberations over whether to withdraw from the 2024 presidential campaign in favor of another candidate, but I had to leave that out for the sake of length.

During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos just days after the disastrous debate performance that launched the discussions over whether Biden should drop out, the latter had said:

Look, I mean, if the Lord Almighty came down and said, “Joe, get out of the race,” I’d get out of the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.

Just like the notion that God directly intervened in the course of affairs to change the path of the shooter’s bullet to save Trump’s life, the idea that the Lord Almighty could only speak to a person by “coming down” and giving him or her a direct message is theologically simplistic. Although admittedly a direct message from God is not outside the realm of possibility, God normally speaks to us through the events of the day, through our feelings (properly discerned), and through contemplation of the Word of God.

Although Biden ultimately withdrew from the race, for a while his public comments demonstrated a certain stubbornness and even arrogance, particularly his claims that only he could defeat Trump, despite consistently trailing in the polls, and that only he could successfully manage American foreign policy. He told Stephanopoulos:

Who’s going to be able to hold NATO together like me? Who’s going to be able to be in a position where I’m able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we’re — we’re at least checkmating China now? Who’s going to — who’s going to do that? Who has that reach?

Any criticism of this hubris has to be tempered, however, by recognizing another important aspect of Biden’s character: his self-perception as the perpetual underdog, underestimated and counted out. When he was a child, Biden’s family suffered economic hardships that deeply shaped his character, and perhaps most famously, he was bullied and mocked for a stutter developed during childhood. In his teenage years and into his twenties, he learned to manage his stutter through self-discipline, reciting poetry in front of a mirror. During his first run for a major political office, the 1972 U.S. Senate race for Delaware, Biden opposed the Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs. Biden trailed by over 30 points in the polls, had minimal campaign funds, and was all but written off, and yet in the end he defeated his opponent. He likewise ran lackluster presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008, and in 2020 he lost the first three Democratic primaries and caucuses only to bounce back and win the South Carolina primary and then most of the primaries on Super Tuesday, leading to his eventual nomination and finally victory over Trump in the general election. Of course, bouncing back from defeat is just part of life in politics, but when this need to prove the bullies and naysayers wrong is a deeply ingrained part of your identity, it can be difficult to know when it’s time to hang up the gloves, and it’s to Biden’s credit that he eventually realized that handing the campaign over to Kamala Harris was in the best interests of the Democratic Party.

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That’s all I have to say about Joe Biden, but considering his character led me to think about my own father, Bill Shadle, who possessed some of the same personality traits despite living a very different life. My dad grew up in poverty and in an abusive household in Little Rock, Arkansas, and when he was six years old, he contracted polio, which left him completely paralyzed in both legs. He walked with the assistance of crutches for most of the rest of his life. Like Biden, he was teased and bullied as a child but held his own. As a young man, he took on the persona of the carousing, pool-playing, fist-fighting rebel—his arms were like pistons from using his crutches—and old photographs suggest he tried to imitate the attire and affect of James Dean and Marlon Brando. He also graduated from college, however—the first in his family to do so—and began working as a newspaper reporter before transitioning to a career with the Social Security Administration.

By the time he got married to my mom and they had me and my younger brother, the bravado of young adulthood had mellowed into a kind of stoic determination. Each day there was a responsibility to keep going, despite the pain and exhaustion, to take care of his wife and kids, certainly, but I suspect also to prove to the world that he was capable of living the same kind of life as everyone else. Whatever flaws he also demonstrated during this part of his life, I have always admired and tried to imitate this sense of determination, particularly when times are difficult. But for my dad, like many others, I think his weakness created in him a need to be strong, both for himself and for those he loved.