The path not taken

  My wife and I spent the Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend hiking near Lake Martin in Dadeville.

  From a stunning view of the lake, we walked through a canopied forest with all kinds of rocks, ridges, and flora. The trail took us to the lake shore, where we took in the vistas and the $1 million homes all around them.

  It’s a reminder of how many natural jewels we have in Alabama. And it’s free. All you have to do is drive there and start walking. No painful real estate investment required.

  I really needed that reminder after a long and bruising session in the Alabama Legislature. Any session of any lawmaking body anywhere means fighting over bills that could prove helpful or destructive to their interests. We see more of it because Alabama’s constitution makes certain the interests of a few powerful elites always take precedence over public concern.

  Worse, a growing number of lawmakers view themselves less as representatives of their communities than lobbyists for whatever right-wing zealots reside there. So we get bills that could have subjected librarians to criminal prosecutions (not passed); would have required mandatory performances or broadcasts of the Star-Spangled Banner (a constitutional amendment, mind you, also not passed) and allowed local governments to separate men and women for whatever reason they deem fit (that one did pass, and within the first 10 days of the legislative session).

  Meanwhile, Alabama can’t run safe prisons; rural residents struggle to access health care, and our lax gun laws have created nation-leading rates of firearm deaths.

  The legislature didn’t spend nearly the time on these issues that they should have.

  Lawmakers did pass bills extending Medicaid coverage to pregnant people and making it a state crime to possess devices that convert semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones.

  Good steps. But just steps. Not the comprehensive, thorough fixes these issues demand.

  Maybe the political lift is too tough. Perhaps lawmakers don’t see them as problems. The prison crisis persists because far too many people think prisoners deserve to live in violence and terror, not thinking about the safety of prison staff or what happens to the rest of us when those people brutalized in the system get out.

  But there’s a larger problem preventing us from finding solutions.

  Alabama politics has no concept of the common good.

  We’d live in a much different landscape if it did. For one thing, Alabama’s top income earners would pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the bottom income earners, and not the other way around.

  The no-questions-asked attitude our lawmakers take to any request from Corrections would apply to Medicaid expansion. Right now, that’s a nonstarter for most Republicans in the legislature. Even though it will improve health and create jobs.  And even though the state’s largest insurer supports a version of it.

  We wouldn’t send $180 million out of public school classrooms for “nonpublic education purposes.” Most of that will go to private school tuition for the wealthy. Instead, the state might finally overhaul a Jim Crow-era tax system that denies poor and rural school districts adequate resources.

  Certainly, we wouldn’t burn down public safety to satisfy a few paranoid gun owners. Or deny lifesaving health care for transgender youth for a handful of fertility-obsessed weirdos. Or rage at people coming to our state from foreign countries, trying to build better lives.

  All too often, the state’s leaders see policy as a zero-sum game: if this person wins, someone has to lose. If I’m a winner, I need to push someone down.

  But that’s not the case. And we know that from the things Alabama has done right.

  Expanding Medicaid access for pregnant people will be good for everyone. Doctors will be able to catch and treat more pregnancy complications before they become fatal. Infant and maternal mortality will drop.

  We have one of the nation’s best pre-K programs, thanks in no small part to years of investment in it. One wishes lawmakers wouldn’t have stopped the push to make pre-K universal. But it’s still changing lives and leading to improved school outcomes around the state.

  And we have state parks, in Dadeville and elsewhere.

  Alabama government can help people. And there are issues that lawmakers, even those ostensibly allergic to any kind of government spending, will turn out their pockets for.

  But all too often, we funnel taxpayer money toward wealthy companies that don’t need the help; wealthy families who don’t need the help, and an incarceration system that punishes without rehabilitating.

  These are choices. They are not inevitable. But all too often, our leaders see their jobs as protecting the privileged, not making a government as good as its people, or as inspiring as its landscapes.

  About the author: Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006 and has worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register, and The Anniston Star. A 2024 Pulitzer finalist for Commentary, his work has also won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

  This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.