After my first visit to Birmingham in almost exactly a half
century, I am very pleasantly surprised.
I always thought of Alabama as the last bastion of willful ignorance,
racism, nationalism, etc. Yes, they were
technically southerners, but displayed none of the gentility I tend to
associate with “true” Southerners. I was
wrong. Like the rest of the South (and
the reason I prefer a Southern racist to a northern one), Alabama appears to
have dealt with its ugly history of racism.
Has it resolved issues of race?
Of course not, but it has acknowledged the racial terrorism in its past,
which is more than most of America does.
Interactions with people were most interesting for me. I can’t go anywhere directly, and as I
wandered around on the way to Selma, I found myself on beautiful backroads,
with majestic trees – that would have been great for hanging people. You could go for miles and not see another
car; while I enjoyed it, I was not unaware of the fact that a knucklehead could
see me, run me off the road, and disappear me without leaving a trace. My interactions with people were the exact
opposite of that. I did not meet a
single person who did not address me as “Ma’am” (because we’re in the south,
not because of my age), and because it’s the South, everybody stopped and made
pleasant conversation. It wasn’t the
gruff assembly line interactions you get in NYC. At one point, as I’m explaining to a woman
that I don’t want to buy another battery pack because I have a solar one in the
hotel, but the heat is wacking out my battery and I’m concerned I may not make
it to Selma, blah, blah, blah – she asks where I’m coming from, I tell her NYC,
and her face lit up like a Christmas tree as she told me how she and her
husband went there a year ago this week, and how they loved Central Park. As she’s telling me this, another lady is
waiting to tell me about how she went with her son when he was eight (he looks
to be a teenager now), and how they had to evacuate the Statue of Liberty for a
bomb threat, and how it made the news… Later on I saw a woman with a family,
including a young boy with a shirt that said “I can do all things..” I asked if
he knew that was part of a Bible verse, and she told me that yes, he knew. The kid is a big fan of Steph Curry and a big
fan of the Bible. We had a long convo
about my friend who idolizes Curry, waited all day for the chance to do one of those
half-court contests, MADE the basket, and got to celebrate with Curry! Then we talked about the young boy and how he’d
had some health challenges, had gone through treatment, and she’d gotten him
the shirt at the end of treatment. We
also talked about kids, helicopter parenting, the advantages of juicy versus
crisp burgers, and the various chain restaurants in Indiana and Kentucy (where
she’s from), NYC, and Alabama.
So the people are cool, but the history is amazing. You fly into Shuttlesworth Airport. I had no idea who Rev. Shuttlesworth was, but
he was an original SJW, and Birmingham has named its Airport after him!! As I
sat out to go to Selma, my offline nav system wasn’t updated for the ongoing
construction, so as I was driving around in circles, I stopped at the 16th
Street Baptist Church. The City and the State have a long history of civil
rights, both abusing them and protecting them. No one is perfect, but what I’ve
seen in Birmingham shows a city doing what I thought only my progressive
college-centric hometown would do:
confront their past, acknowledge its strengths and weaknesses, build on
the former, and eradicate the latter.
Now, one of my profesors share an article about kids from
Harvard who met people from the heartland and got to know them. I assume Alabama was a red state, and I
expected everyone here to be a character out of Deliverance. I couldn’t have been more wrong, while makes
me wonder where the disconnect happened that so many of them went to the dark
side? I think perhaps labeling people as “deplorables” was not helpful; seems a
number of people embraced that moniker and allowed it to define them. But what about those who were offended, or
whose fragile senses of self and self-esteem were fractured with the utterance
of such a label? Not trying to make
excuses for them, just trying to figure out what went wrong – everybody that
voted for that guy is not an idiot, is not a racist, is not unintelligent – so what
went wrong?
It would be nice if those in the political realm could do
like the people of Birmingham have done, and say: we made a real mess here. Let’s examine it and ourselves, make some
changes, and see that it never happens again.
Fellow liberals, we could learn a thing or two from the folk of Alabama…
***Sigh*** and now the people from the conference are
returning to the hotel, disrupting the quiet with their hallway banter and
conversations.
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