The World Around You

Once again the legislature shows how its priorities are in order. Another bill has moved through committee early in the session on a most grave and important issue of our day, displaying the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence in all our schools. Yeah Senators! Oh and we also got the bill that every student and teacher should recite the pledge of allegiance every single day. Yeah!

Now we have a Governor’s race on our hands folks! We may not officially have Roy Moore or Lucy Baxley,but we have Loretta Nall!

For the record, Nall and her group don’t approve of kids using and selling drugs in school. She thinks student drug users should be punished or sent to treatment programs. But she doesn’t think they should be expelled and branded as criminals. Especially not for marijuana, which she equates to beer and cigarettes.

“Zero tolerance is a pipeline to prison for these kids,” she said.

But this is not an easy subject to discuss, especially with a stranger in a drugstore parking lot.

“I am running for governor of Alabama,” she tells a cluster of five kids from John I. Leonard High School, who take the news in stride, as if it were nothing to be told this on the corner of 10th Avenue North and Haverhill Road on a Tuesday afternoon.

Nall hands them drug-reform buttons and literature while asking them what they think about kids from their school getting arrested for drugs. The kids look at each other, unsure of what to say.

“It’s none of my business,” says Curtis Rivera, 15, a freshman. “The police can do whatever they want.”

This isn’t the kind of response she is looking for.

I really do love Alabama politics. You can’t beat the variety.

It’s good to see that ensuring the destruction of citizen’s civil rights is still at the top of Alabama legislators’ agendas. I’m particularly proud of the African-American legislators who celebrated Black History Month by voting to block others from their civil rights. Perhaps they were thinking about Section 102 of the Alabama Constitution when they were voting:

SECTION 102

Miscegenation laws.
The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, or descendant of a negro.

Some of them try to get around their votes by saying they are simply allowing the people to decide. It’s fine to put the burden on the people, but the burden of history will fall on these legislators for taking yet another action which will have to be rectified at a later date. As I have said to many who favor this measure, my generation will not allow this to stand and you can “play defense” as Mike Hubbard said, but all you’re doing is increasing the number of barriers we will have to destroy at a later date. In other words, you do what you have to do and we will do what we have to do when you are dead and gone.