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Dear Alabama,

Dear Alabama,

We don’t know each other well. I visited briefly a few times over the past twenty years; the four days I spent in Birmingham with a group of teenagers working on a crumbling church, the weekend visit I made to Montgomery to a college friend’s wedding. These were cursory and fleeting glimpses of you, I admit.

Most of what I know about you I know from a distance; through the news and on social media and from the history books. Such things only offer a limited view I realize—and as much as I’ve tried to formulate an accurate image of you, I know I’m dealing with incomplete information. Whatever portrait I’ve created in my head of who you are or what you care about, is at best a poor caricature, so you’ll have to forgive me.

Having said that, that imperfect picture of you I’ve constructed lately is admittedly concerning. Over the past few months, the story that these disparate fragments of information are writing together, is one of rekindled bigotry; of a descending, politically partisan morality, of a fiercely exclusionary, coercive religion. It is a story of the steady erosion of civil rights. It is a story of only white lives really mattering: white, Christian, male lives, most specifically.

And here’s the thing, Alabama—that story may be fully jacked up, it may be a complete distortion of who you are. The racism and misogyny, the dehumanizing language about LGBTQ people, the gun-waving bravado, the sexual assault victim- blaming that are all becoming your bold type headline—that may not be who you are or want to be. The ugliness of these days may not be your story at all.

And that’s the beautiful thing about elections, Alabama: they let us tell our true stories. They give us the moment to speak solely for ourselves; about who we are, what matters to us, the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of men and women we want representing us. We get to tell people what we demand and what we will not tolerate. Our morality and our values and our hearts are on display in the votes we cast or do not cast.

We get to cut through every stereotype, every media cheap shot, every irrational fear, every time-tested bit of shorthand. 

We get to remove all doubt as to who we are.

You get to do this too.

Today is important for many people, but it’s most important for you—because today you get to tell your story, and at the end of the day that story will be your legacy.

It won’t be a story written by the liberal or the conservative media or by people looking on from a distance or from occasional visitors who might speculate. It won’t be written by Presidential Tweets or polls or pundits or bloggers who spent a few days with you.

Tomorrow the world we wake up and you will have spoken clearly and loudly to us.

You will have said:

This is who we are.
This is what we value.

This is what we think about the diverse humanity comprising this nation.
This is how much we care about the vulnerable and the marginalized and the silenced.
This is what we believe about black lives and dreamers and me toos.
This is what we want the world to know about us.

Stereotype and caricatures and false stories are always terrible things. They are wasteful and unhelpful and insulting. They are the source of far too many unnecessary wars and far too few honest conversations.

And that, Alabama is why I look forward to finding out who you really are today.

I look forward to you speaking your truth today so I can stop wondering if I’m right about you.

America is looking on.

We’re all listening.

We’re all watching.

Show us who you are.

Whatever you say today—we’re going to believe you.

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