What I will say if Roy Moore wins tomorrow: [View all]

[struggle4progress]

Fifty some years ago, when I was much younger, Alabama had a reputation

It was a rough scofflaw countryside of unreconstructed Confederates, still angry that Greatgranpaw lost the civil war, a place whose governor promised to defy federal law and said a few funerals would end the civil rights movement, a land where uniformed police attacked nonviolent protestors, where Klansmen dynamited churches and "good folk" protected violent ones in a great conspiracy of silence

With the passage of time, the dreadful wounds of that era became scars for many people. But now we have learned, clearly, decisively, that unreconstructed Confederates still hold Alabama, with the old carefully-cultivated grievance -- Greatgreatgranpaw's defeat -- still festering and newer (also carefully-cultivated) grievances, such as the fact that the federal government finally prosecuted some church-bombers

Of course, these miraculously never-healing wounds are dressed with more socially-acceptable bandages, the most common being the same claims of Christian piety which once masked the cruelties of slavery and later unleashed cross-burning lynch mobs as the guardians of white Christian civilization. Behind the loud protestations of Christian mission from Alabamians who despise the federal government and want to undo the amendments that the Party of Lincoln bequeathed unto us in the 1860s, there hide the familiar Confederate ghosts, daily picking the scabby sores of their haunted descendants, determined never to forgive nor forget the demythologizing of Greatgreatgranpaw and Greatgranpaw and the church bombers

It is all of one piece, of course: contempt for the rights of blacks, contempt for the rights of women, contempt for the rights of little girls. Lack of personal discipline and restraint naturally spreads. But in this case, we must note with some regret, the GOP has for many decades been cultivating such contempts in hopes of electoral gain: contempt for the poor, contempt for the migrant, an ever-growing list of people to despise

This is a time of crisis. We have survived hard times in the past and we can survive this one, but there will be a cost to us all