My love for the United States of America was first instilled in me by my father, Donald C. Steiger. Dad was a great patriot — a man who took a stand for God, country, and family, in that order, and never wavered.
He lectured his children around the dinner table from the time we were small. He was not lecturing in the way that makes children tune out. He was transmitting something. Beliefs. Convictions. A way of reading the world that came from faith, from history, and from his own experience as a man who had thought carefully about what mattered and why.
At one point, my father was offered the opportunity to run for Congress from Wyoming. He turned it down. He chose his family and the JH Ranch instead.
I have thought about that decision many times over the decades. In our culture, we tend to treat political ambition as the proof of seriousness — the validation that a person's convictions are real. My father understood something different. He understood that the most important work often happens far from the spotlight. That the dinner table can shape a nation as surely as the floor of Congress. That the decision to be present for your children is not a sacrifice of influence — it is an exercise of it.
He later moved to Arkansas and became one of the early Republican pioneers in the 1970s, helping establish the party in a state where that was not yet the path of least resistance. He did that work because he believed in it, not because it was easy.
One of Dad's closest friends in Wyoming was a rancher named JW Nuckolls — a man who shared his values and his love of the land. JW raised Corriedale sheep. My first 4-H project was a ewe and lamb I bought from JW in 1968. Years later, he would welcome my sons and me back to his ranch overlooking Devil's Tower to hunt White Tail Deer. Some friendships run that deep.
My father turned down Congress. He chose us instead. That is the most important thing I know about him, and about what real patriotism looks like.