I just got home from a weekend excursion to Alabama. My wife and I took in an Auburn football game (brutal loss…) and spent the weekend visiting her family. All in all, it was a relatively pleasant experience…
Except for…
As you might have guessed by now, I’m backing Barack Obama in this year’s presidential election. If this surprises you, I would invite you to click on the Politics category and ready pretty much anything you find there. While I knew, intellectually, that Alabama was “Red State” country and largely in support of John McCain, I really didn’t understand, in my gut, what that meant until I went to the game on Saturday.
Maybe you’ve heard those stories about people at McCain rallies who say that Obama is ‘an Arab’ and dismiss them as the rantings of scattered morons in a sea of otherwise rational human beings. I talked to more than a few McCain supporters at the game (a local politician was giving out McCain/Palin stickers, and nearly everyone in the crowd of over 80,000 people had one on), and ‘Arab’ is only the first in an alphabetical list of things I heard Obama called this weekend.
- Arab
- Communist
- Foreigner
- Mohammedan
- Muslim
- The “N-bomb”
- Non-Christian
- Socialist
- Un-American
- Uppity
I heard more than one person state flatly that although they knew nothing about Obama’s policies, they would vote for McCain because they didn’t want a black man in the White House. I honestly thought we were past this kind of thing as a nation. These weren’t “Bubbas” wearing overalls and driving pickup trucks. These were men and women whose only distinguishing superficial characteristics from an otherwise intelligent human being was an eastern Alabama accent. These were doctors and lawyers and otherwise educated men and women saying things like “Obama should know his place” and “I won’t vote for any Muslim.”
To be fair, not every person wearing a McCain/Failin’ sticker was racially motivated. I heard folks talk about how Obama was going to raise taxes for them despite the fact that none of the people who voiced this fear were in a tax bracket affected adversely by Obama’s economic plan. I heard folks talk about how Obama was going to make the US weaker even though the current President has done more to damage the United States around the world than any President in my lifetime and McCain’s plan is to continue those policies.
I don’t know what scared me more. The fact that they didn’t know any better? or the fact that the information is so easy to find, yet they don’t care enough to look for it. In a way, it is a testament to the power of the Conservative Christian movement in the south. I saw very little curiosity and a great deal of lock-step dogmatism masquerading as intelligent thought. Having lived in the south for my entire life, I know for a fact that not everyone falls into that stereotype, but seeing such a large number of those people in one place was a bit frightening. Those votes count just as much as mine does, and they put as much thought into who will be the most powerful leader in the world as I might put into which football game I’m going to watch next weekend.
