I’m an Alabamian. I have good friends all over the socioeconomic spectrum. A close relative holds an elected office. We have conversations about politics and I know basically no one who actually wants legislation like this, total abortion bans, illegal interracial marriages, and so on. These people exist, clearly but it’s not anyone I know. We just want to be left alone.

The biggest problem, as I see it, is that so few young people vote on state-level issues and so only the boomers and retirees are represented. There’s a lot of poverty and that distracts from political involvement. In my experience, the poorer you are the less time you have to hate(or care about anything but yourself and the present moment). Also, Alabama just isn’t perceived as having much of an impact on most peoples lives. It’s a poor state, the infrastructure sucks, traffic laws go largely unenforced on many rural highways. The truckers know this too. So many boaters genuinely believe that drinking and operating a boat is perfectly legal, and for all practical purposes it is. These are just examples of why I think a lot of people don’t care about what the state attempts to do.

My hope is that if SCOTUS continues to wind back federal oversight on these various issues, more people will see a need to be politically involved. That, and as these old folks croak. I guess this is three paragraphs of nothing useful but whatever.