Montgomery, trying

The capital city of Alabama does a better job than Washington at representing everyone.

You absolutely must visit the Legacy Museum.

They say football is a religion in Alabama and they are not lying. I showed up in Montgomery on a Saturday afternoon just after Thanksgiving. The Saturday after Thanksgiving is the day of the Iron Bowl between Alabama (roll tide!) and Auburn (war eagle!), teams that couldn’t be bigger rivals if they tried. Maybe you already knew that; apparently everyone knows about the Iron Bowl except me, and if you’re not watching it you are, clearly, a space alien.

That’s OK, I like space aliens.

I had just spent a wonderful two weeks on the Gulf of Mexico, between Jacksonville and New Orleans, and I was on my way back up to my beloved Huntsville from Pensacola Beach. I thought a layover in Montgomery was just the thing, for me to explore the capital city and what it has to offer.

Given that literally everyone was watching the game except for one couple from Boston who, like me, were thoroughly spooked by the empty streets, I had the opportunity to roam without having to watch for cars or wait for anything. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a ghost town.

Montgomery, of course, has an awful, no-good racist history. Some might say a present, too. But that wouldn’t be accurate. Not that there aren’t bigots. But people are really trying to come to grips with the legacy of slavery and systemic racism, and come to some kind of reconciliation. It’s slow and imperfect but there is genuine effort.

Montgomery is also the seat of resistance, from Martin Luther King’s first church (directly across from the much larger state capital building) to the bus protests and Rosa Parks and, today, to the Legacy Museum (about which I wrote during the ICE nightmare in Minneapolis).

It’s easy to think, what with Donald Trump turning the White House into a trailer park with gold appliqué from Home Depot, that the United States has gone thoroughly bonkers. I continue to push back against the idea. Everywhere I go in the United States I meet good people — Republicans, Democrats, Independents, people who don’t vote — who, regardless of their background or religion or socio-economic status, try their best to be better today than they were yesterday.

Violata Pax Dove in Troy, Alabama. (More info.)

I think of artists like Nall whose works are exposed in a museum in his native Troy, not far from Montgomery, and how he challenged so much of what we assume is the narrative in the South. I think of couples who run indie coffee shops in every town, and people whose lives are devoted to serving others.

I don’t think any of them like how the South Lawn has been turned into a UFC octagon, even if they enjoy watching fights on TV. They don’t like that one man can turn the presidency into an ATM for himself and his family. They don’t like the way ICE treats people even if they broadly support immigration reform and enforcement.

They are just as tired of this shit show as you and I. Worse because it’s being done in their name, and they feel powerless to end it in-between elections. Which now are also known as national IQ tests. They better not flunk the next one either, eh.

I look at today’s leaders in a city like Montgomery where slaves were sold in open markets, now standing tall behind efforts towards reckoning and reconciliation (the issue of disenfranchising black voters thanks to the Supreme Court notwithstanding; we’re still far from perfection), and I cling to a belief that this country I have roamed and loved for decades will wake up from this nightmare and start reasserting honour and decency in public life.