A thousand thanks to black people
You’ve saved us all from the worst. Again. Talk about the value of diversity.
I remember the first time this hit me between the eyes. David Duke decided to challenge Edwin Edwards for the governorship of Louisiana. Duke, card-carrying Nazi white supremacist. Edwards, not totally awful, fairly competent incumbent governor who’d used his position for some truly massive corruption. It was so bad he eventually got sent to Federal jail for ten years. But at the time he was out and about. And we all had bumperstickers: Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.
Well, Edwards won, but I was aghast to see that if it had been up to whites we would have woken up to the Nazi. Sixty percent of the white vote went to the card-carrying Nazi. Sixty percent.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to the blacks of Alabama. Thank you to the NAACP who had the sense to work on voter registration and turnout. Thank you to all the other groups who helped facilitate voting. Thank you to Doug Jones who had the sense to understand that people needed help voting. And thank you to the large minority of white women and the smaller minority of white men who were capable of telling right from wrong. At a time like this, it’s useful to remember that good people come in all shapes and sizes.
We really are stronger together.
In one of the first elections I was biting at the bit to vote in, an early pimple of “Christianity” was running against a man who had just been convicted of having a slush fund in his Congressional coat
pockets.
An older woman at my workplace in Georgia counseled me, wrt the convict: “He’s done his time, he’s not going to do it anytime soon, so vote for him.”
I couldn’t vote for either one. One of the first eruptions of dirty evangelicals vs. a breaker of American law, so I left it blank.
When I went to turn in my Georgia ballot, the woman there said I had to choose someone or it would be chosen for me. I punched them both.
Earlynerd on December 14th, 2017 at 22:16
At least there was a real choice this time in Alabama. As you point out, thank goodness black people were there to save the state and make a giant stride forward in saving the federal government.
It’s still hard to believe that if it were up to the white voters in Alabama, a serial pedophile would be a U.S. senator by now.
Earlynerd on December 16th, 2017 at 01:47
Yes, indeed. Boggles my mind, too. Tribalism above all predates the Repubs, sadly.
quixote on December 20th, 2017 at 11:21