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July 25, 2005

"just like coming home"

thanks to all the peeps, all my friends, who try to keep up with this, including all my new readers which now include the staff at exit productions for pointing out that i do not post to this blog nearly enough. i appreciate your enthusiam and wish that i could accommodate all your requests but i am a very busy guy with a great many obligations and so consequently my attention to things like blogs tends to suffer from time to time. case in point...driving to alabama.

now the first question i that i inevitably get when i tell people that i was recently in alabama is, "why?" there's really no good reason for this except that alabama is where my friend barrett lives and since i am on vacation i determined that this would be the best time to go see him. you know, between hurricanes. also, i had been to alabama once when i was a kid touring with bob dylan and the band but i don't really remember it since all the southern states east of texas just seemed to blend together into one big backwoods gumbo. however, i'm glad that i went because i got to see my friend and as an added bonus i got to come home to mississippi. that's right i said "home to mississippi." i have photographic proof that mississipi is "just like coming home" which i will show to you as soon as i get digital reproductions of the photographs. anyway, i drove pretty much straight through from dallas to birmingham stopping only briefly to eat, pee and take pictures of strangers, the strangest one being me.

birmingham is a city of unexpected size. i wes thinking that it would be about waco-ish in proportion but was actually quite taken aback to discover that it is nearly the same size as our fair city of austin. i was also kind of amazed (and pleasantly so i might add) to discover that as a city of unexpected size birmingham has both indoor plumbing AND electric street lights. although i'm not sure that could be said of my new home of mississippi. one of the other things that birmingham has is the civil rights institute. i was informed of this by my mother who also informed me that if i were in birmingham and did not go visit the civil rights institute my status of "son" might have to be re-evaluated. so, in an effort not lose the positon that i had worked lo these 30 years to acheive, and because my mother is a very bright woman, i took her advice and visited the birmingham civil rights institute.this is the part where i get serious.

see, i think about civil rights alot. that's how i was raised, you know that whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" philosophy that was popularized by one of those radical left wing thinkers, what was his name? chris something i think. or maybe jesse somebody or other. no, i remember...it's jebus cripes. that's it. anyway, the point is this, i was taught to treat other people with respect and kindness and dignity. and i was struck with the irony that the day i left alabama eric rudolph was was convicted of bombing an abortion clinic in birmingham (a place known in the sixties as "bombingham" due to all the bombings of churches and homes of prominent black activists) to which he unapologetically pleaded guilty and referred to the work that took place at the clinic as "barbarism." you know how white southerners referred to interracial marriage forty years ago? would you also like to guess which ethnic group has the highest rate of abortion in birmingham? and would you also like to guess which ethnic group has the greatest number protesters outside of abortion clinics? you can probably see where i'm going with this.

the point is this, the bigots of birmingham, like bigots everywhere, have gone from bombing churches to bombing abortion clinics and gay night clubs, and poisioning radio and tv by spewing vitriolic bile into our airwaves, sowing the seeds of domestic terrorism (that's right, i said terrorism) by trying to create a divisive atmosphere of "us versus them." which is why birmingham has an "institute" of civil rights and not a museum. see, a museum would imply that the civil rights movement is a thing of the past, that the struggle for personal freedom and indivdual liberty have been acheived when really, the struggle is just beginning. there's opprtunity for freedom in that we don't have jim crow around any more, now all we have to do is work on that respct and dignity thing. that would be the "as you would have them do unto you" part of that little...what did jebus call it? oh yeah, COMMANDNENT. and it's easy for me as a white man to pontificate about civil rights being an ongoing struggle but i really have no clue, nor will i ever, as to what that really means. which is why i, as a white person, need someplace like the civil rights institute to sort of put in perspective how truly awful discrimination can be and what it might mean to have to fight for the right to vote or sit wherever you want to on the bus or go to whatever school you want or marry whoever you want and not be hanged by a crazy bigoted mob.

on the way home i stopped in vicksburg, mississippi where there is a significant civil war battlefield. i drove through the dense kudzu forest of the lower mississippi river basin past monument after monument and cannon after cannon. 12 miles and 2 hours of a reminder of how our nation was nearly torn apart because of a difference of ideology. each side had their artillary trained on the other trying to wear them down and break their spirit in the hopes of gaining some ground in support for their cause. after i had seen all the war memorabelia i could stand i drove off trying to find a radio station that wasn't trying to convince me that the spread of AIDS in africa was being encouraged by the distribution of condoms. or that gay marriage would lead to the complete and utter demise of each and every american family. or why iraq shouldn't be allowed to become a state that is governed by islamic law but the united states should allow alot more biblical law into it's schools, courts and other public institutions and that anyone who thinks otherwise is barbaric, godless and immoral and i thought to myself "you know, mississippi IS alot like coming home."

except that, you know, MY home has my mother in it. remember her? ...the one who insisted that i visit the civil rights institute and taught me to "love your neighbor as yourself." wait, was that her or that cripes guy? i think i first heard it from cripes...but i wouldn't be surprised if he stole it from my mom.

Posted by adamgraves at July 25, 2005 03:18 PM

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Posted by: rlo at July 26, 2005 01:49 AM

Posted by: flash at July 27, 2005 11:32 PM

Posted by: Bre at August 1, 2005 02:53 PM

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