Good Morning.
Tomorrow the citizens of Alabama will choose a United States Senator. The special election is the result of Jeff Sessions
being appointed Attorney General and replaced by Luther Strange who was defeated in a special primary by a controversial judge named Roy Moore. The Democratic nominee is a guy named Doug Jones, so tomorrow there are two men, each with two one-syllable names. Under normal circumstances name recognition might be a problem but not in this particular situation. Half the planet knows who they are and half the planet will be watching what happens.
I lived in southern Alabama during the volatile Sixties when the Civil Rights movement was in full swing and the Ku Klux
Klan was roaming the countryside in their white sheets. They put on regular clothes to attend church with their wives who were more than happy to iron those sheets for the next cross burning. I had a black friend from Bermuda who had come to this country to attend NYU, obtained a degree in English, and married a graduate of West Point. He was, at the time of the friendship, a captain in the Army, a Vietnam veteran, and a flight instructor at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Because of the huge number of troops training for combat, there was enough housing on post only for the senior officers, so the rest of us had to take up residence in the nearby small southern towns. I got to live in a brand-new brick ranch with porch lights and azaleas; Marilyn was relegated to an old slave shack with dirt that passed as a front yard. She would come to my house frequently for coffee and fetch the mail from the box at the street because it was beastly hot and I was pregnant with my second child. One day my neighbor asked me how anyone my age could afford a maid and when I told her that Marilyn was a friend, she declared, Bible in hand, that the races were not supposed to be equal and I had better change my ways. I did not, of course.
On the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, I had Marilyn and her husband for dinner and probably flipped off the old bag as I was setting the table with my silver and china.
A lot has changed since 1968 but a lot hasn't changed at all. This Moore fellow does stuff that is very popular in his state,
like posting the Ten Commandments in public places and proposing that homosexuality be made illegal. He flashes a handgun at political rallies and the message is clearly not about shooting a quail or a rabbit for supper. He proclaims to be pro-life but one wonders whether that means protecting certain of the unborn or all of them. One must also ask whether he understands that the human beings who give birth are members of a gender he is accused of sexually abusing, even more
deplorably when his victims should be selecting prom dresses rather than maternity clothes.
The outcome of the election tomorrow will depend on who votes. If Moore's crowd flocks to the polls, he will win. If some of the women who would normally vote for him stay home or find it possible to vote for Jones and if every Democrat in the state, including every black person fortunate enough to be registered to vote casts a ballot, Jones will win. Either way it will be a momentous election, not so the tax reform bill can pass or not, but because the ugliness that has worn the face of ignorance and hatred and abuse for centuries is either very much alive or is, at least, up for discussion.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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