Humans are impatient, but changes in Alabama show speed of change

By David McElroy · June 12, 2013

To me, 50 years seems like a very long time. That’s more than half of the life of the average person. For us, a decade can seem forever. We’re so impatient that a year can seem like a long time to wait for a thing. But I sometimes forget that history is measured on a very different scale.

It was 50 years ago this week when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace made his theatrical stand against federal demands that the University of Alabama admit black students. It’s remembered as “the stand in the schoolhouse door,” but it was purely symbolic.

In his 1962 campaign, Wallace had promised to fight to prevent racial integration of any Alabama schools. His dramatic stand was a popular political position at the time, but he knew he couldn’t win the battle. It was merely important for his political future that he be seen as standing up to the Kennedy administration.

Hundreds of Alabama state troopers and Alabama National Guard troops were surrounding the building on the UA campus where registration took place at the time. After President John F. Kennedy federalized the National Guard troops, Brig. Gen. Henry Graham officially told Wallace that he was acting at the direction of the president — and he ordered Wallace to step aside.

Wallace stepped aside without incident. There was no violence in Tuscaloosa. The two black students were enrolled. The university and the state slowly moved on. Even Wallace came to regret his role in segregation and apologized to blacks, who became a key constituency when he won election for the very last time, in 1982.

When I was a student at Alabama, the student body was about 10 percent black. It’s about 12 percent black today. The university actively recruits qualified black students, and anyone with the test scores to get in will be admitted.

There are different ways to look at this incident from 50 years ago. The simple one — and the most common one — is to ask why it was necessary for those racist southerners to go through this much trouble to achieve something as simple and obvious as allowing people of all races access to public facilities such as the university.

(The people who sneeringly take this approach frequently prefer to point fingers at the South, but conveniently forget white parents in Boston turning to violence when racial integration came to that city. Racial problems are much more widespread and common than people sometimes like to remember.)

There’s another way I choose to look at this incident, though. From the standpoint of history, 50 years is like the blink of an eye. We see change as happening slowly, but in historical terms, it’s happening very, very quickly. It would be nice if positive change came in a day or a week or a month, but it takes years or decades. Even at 50 years, though, that’s nothing in the long term.

Many of us today are frustrated at the state of politics. Those of us who oppose the coercive state find it hard to see anything changing. But change is coming. Maybe not as quickly as we would like. It might take a decade. Or a few decades. It could even take a hundred years. We might go through a period of chaos when it’s not clear what’s going to happen. Some areas could see new forms of oppression.

But change will come. I think the next big step in the evolution of governance will be private governance that allows people to control their own property and their own lives by living under rules of their choosing. For some people, that’s crazy talk, but people who lived under powerful royal families would have seen it as crazy talk to imagine that power could be more widely dispersed. What I see happening is just the next logical step beyond that.

The only point I want to leave you with is that individuals and history measure time on very different scales. It might seem to us that the tyrants and arrogant politicians have always held power and always will. But change is coming. Maybe not in the time frame we’d like. We might or might not see it.

Remember that history and the changes it brings will outlive all of us. Change is coming, even if we can’t see it yet — just as those disenfranchised blacks would have had trouble imagining the University of Alabama today.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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