Alabama. How 'bout you?

Alabama.
Alabama sticks in my mind, going way back.
To get from Louisiana to Georgia, you have to drive through that Sweet Home state of Alabama, the state where folks drive around with a license plate that says: Stars fell on . . .
Alabama, whatever that means.
I'll tell you what it means. it means crucible.
It means the place where America's deepest hopes and deepest fears about building a great nation and living out the ideal of all men and women being created equal by Creator God, the place where all those deepest hopes and deepest fears clashed in the thoroughfares of history on a highway between Selma and Montgomery,
and on the steps of the state capitol when President Kennedy sent soldiers in to compel George Wallace to do his job and allow the black folks of Sweet Home to vote and to go to school and to University.
And then later, years later, George Wallace issued a public apology for his former racist bullshit way of doing things. And I remember this video I saw online just a year or two or three ago of Wallace sitting in a wheelchair, his daughter by his side, telling the blacks folk and all of us, all the people of America that he was sorry.
I mean I saw this, so to speak, with my own eyes, (online.) It all happened in my lifetime.
This George Wallace who was speaking in my hometown, back in the day, 1968, when he went to the Louisiana legislature and spoke there and he said if they'd send him to Washington he'd take all their suitcases from all them bureaucrats in Washington and throw them suitcases in the Potomac River, and when he said that all the Louisianans who filled that legislative chamber laughed.
But such hyperbole was not a rhetorical stunt unknown to the folks of the bayou state, many of whom in that room that day could still remember what Huey Long had said back in the day, 1930's.
'Course we all know it didn't amount to a hill of beans. Dick Nixon went to the white house that year instead the Alabama governor. Hubert Humphrey was the one who lost big time that year because Wallace peeled off a bunch of them riled-up southern Democrats.
I mean, Hubert got a raw deal in Chicago, but we can't be crying in our beer forever. He was a nice guy. God bless him, Hubert. May he rest in peace; and, for that matter, may Richard Nixon rest in peace.
We all have our faults.
All of this has happened in my lifetime, y'all, which wasn't so long ago and it's still happening today.
We have seen serious changes during these 65 years. I'm not making this up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MhOZt5-Jl8
Maybe I'm just dreaming it, but if I am just dreaming it, well shut my mouth.
But as I was sayin'--I'm talking' 'bout Alabama now--the place where all of our darkest southern closets got blasted open to reveal them skeletons in them closets, them skeletons of racism that most Alabamans have now left in the dust of history but every now and then someone drags them old skeletons out of them closets.
Dogs sicced on freedom riders, four martyred girls in 16th Street Baptist church, Birmingham.
This blood was not shed in vain. The blood of the martyrs is the seeds of . . .
So these days, November 2016, y'all can rant in the streets all you want to, but I'm here to tell you that this new Attorney General appointee, Sen. Jeff Sessions, him about whom the Dems are so upset, while they be trying to affix the R-word to Senator Jeff's reputation just because he be from Alabama, and yet I see on Resurgent this morning these photos of Jeff Sessions holding hands with Rep. John Lewis
http://theresurgent.com/seriously-trump-the-pictures-of-jeff-sessions-they-dont-want-you-to-see/
as they were commemorating the stand taken back in the day, 1965, when Dr. King, Dr. Abernathy, young John Lewis and many others who, being with them all together of one accord and holding hands, marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge while trying to walked from Selma to Montgomery but then them Alabama troopers sent out by the old Wallace, not the later-repentent Wallace, stopped them civil rights marchers on the bridge and beat the hell out 'em.
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/selma-montgomery-march/videos/bloody-sunday
But this blood was not shed in vain. The blood of the martyrs is the seeds of . . .
But then, as the poet said, and still says, the times they are a-changin'.
And so they did, and they still are.
Hence, just a year ago as I was cleaning a laundry room at work and listening on the radio to John Lewis' account of that infamous Bloody Sunday event, as he was recalling it to Terri Gross or Diane Rehm or someone like that, and I remember what Rep. Lewis said about being beat up and it was some bad shit going down but they lived to tell about it and ultimately they prevailed all the way to the steps of the Alabama state capitol and Dr. King spoke and it really stuck with me.
So now in November 2016 I'm seeing this jpg of Sessions and Lewis holding hands on the Edmund Pettus bridge and
this has all happened in my lifetime, y'all.
Please don't tell me it was a dream. Let me have my dream. I have the dream, all God's children. . . don't you have a dream?
I mean, this all happened in my lifetime y'all.
Alabama, please ya'll don't forget this excruciated crucible of our great American dream, where the blood of saints and sinners was shed for the liberty of us all. If you ever go there, remember you'll be treading on holy ground, ground made holy by the shedding of the blood of the Lamb,
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/birmingham-church-bombing
but that was before the stars fell on Alabama. Now people there have seen the light, or at least I hope they have. I'm willing to give them a little grace, and a little space, to cross our next bridge.
How 'bout you?

Glass half-Full