What It’s Like to Live in Alabama
“Them old cotton fields?” They’re still here in Alabama along with their rich black soil and poor black hands tending them. There are poor white hands, too, and some rich ones, involved in everything from shrimping on the Gulf coast to coal mining in the north. But Alabama’s most famous product is not agricultural or industrial: it’s conceptual; it’s conservatism — but not the theoretical kind, not the preoccupation of eggheads. Conservatism in Alabama is visceral, palpable to the point of bloodshed, manifestation of ideas manipulated for specific outcomes designed to reflect presumed values that are really nothing more than the rejection of acceptance. If love is acceptance, hate is rejection and hate is manufactured by conservatism.
Alabama abounds in examples of conservatism turned physical. Racial segregation — the epitome of rejection — is the historically infamous paradigm that tirelessly guides successor efforts, lately attempting the annihilation of rights that women have over their own bodies. The conservative position on abortion is so extreme that people across the country wonder what it’s like to live in Alabama. That’s the wrong question. It depends on who you ask. Many Alabamians never look beyond their own turf, with few scratching below the surface or believing there is anything deeper or even caring if they knew. Yet, there are many takes on Alabama and plopped down in a given location, a visitor could not distinguish it from any other part of the country, replete with shopping malls and fast food outlets the same as elsewhere.
What distinguishes Alabama is its preponderance of stultifying conservatism, heavy and more suffocating than most places, a virtually impenetrable fog of conformity. Government is a good example, and the wages it mandates, held to the abysmally inadequate national minimum by a state legislature that refuses higher cost urban areas the right to raise requirements. But government, like all artificial constructs, emanates from prevailing ideas, the leading authority and basis for every manifestation. In Alabama, the concept of dense conservatism is the ultimate foundation from which all examples emerge. Contrivance of new means and methods of its implementation is blood sport that ruins lives, often ending them, too, enriching a few but elevating no one. Many lifelong Alabamians don’t seem to notice, accepting the fatality of fate with thoughtless abandon, resting in the welcoming arms of hopelessness, not despair, but the absence of hope, the mesmerizing, numbing chloroform of conservatism.
This is the opinion of an outsider, albeit an old one who has lived most of his life here. Ask someone else what it’s like to live in Alabama. After an awkward silence, the likely response would be, “Well, it’s okay, I guess.” Okay: acceptance of fate that, for many, involves not just hard times, but lack of opportunity of any sort. Ask a better question instead. Ask an individual what it’s like to live their life. There will be another awkward silence because chances are they’ve never thought about it. But ask enough people this question and you’re apt to find some who found a flashlight — for their own minds, at least.
Unfortunately for the rest of the country, seeds of perverse conservatism have scattered, so if you feel compelled to inquire what it’s like to live in Alabama, you might just as well ask someone who lives in Maine. Or Wisconsin. Or Kansas. Or…
in the public domain by Michael Driver no rights reserved
See also: “Rot At the Core of the South” (available on Medium)
