By Glynn Wilson –

MOBILE, Ala. — When Republican Congressman Bradley Byrne announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate here Wednesday night and mentioned “Alabama values,” it made me stop to ponder what he was talking about.

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In his extemporaneous speech at Wintzell’s Oyster House downtown, he mentioned things like faith in God, love of family, and not killing babies. I don’t know if those things are actually values in the sociological sense, but there are certainly traits that people talk about from everywhere, not just America or Alabama.

But for years, as I traveled around the region and lived in other places and engaged with friends from Alabama who got out and lived in places like New Orleans, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, Oregon and even New York, when we talk about what people are like in Alabama, the key words and phrases that tend to come up are more likely to be “racism” and “racist,” “religious fundamentalism” or “religious nuts,” “ignorance” and the “ignorant,” maybe even “stupid,” which is even worse than ignorant. Stupid implies that people are just dumb, with a low Intelligence Quotient or IQ. To be ignorant means you are just uneducated or undereducated about some subjects.

One photographer friend of mine from Walker County, who will remain anonymous since he literally has decided to live his life out in the country walled off and invisible on the internet, has long said that the people in Alabama are the most “hateful” people anywhere, “full of hate.” He also says people in Alabama seem “angry” all the time, more so than those in other places he’s lived.

A few people have accused me of seeming angry myself at times, but I think this is only since I sort of got stuck back in Alabama a few years ago. I included my response to this in my book.

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After spending the past five winters in Mobile, however, our conversations have more recently included the phrase “crazy,” or just “mentally ill.”

I swear of all the places I have lived in my life, there are more crazy, stupid people here than anywhere else. Of course you will find this anywhere, except maybe Norway or Sweden.

I don’t know if it’s the stress of living in a place where it rains all the time and there’s not much to do for fun, where society is incredibly segregated and divided into suburbs, or whether it is genetic. Maybe the people who decided to settle here in this crazy swamp in the first place 300 years ago were just mentally challenged as hell and their descendants inherited the nutjob gene.

But when I woke up Thursday morning and begin to surf for news on Facebook, I kid you not when I tell you that there is a new story and study out claiming there is actual data behind a claim that Alabama is in the top 10 states in the country for anger and hate.

Don’t just take my word for it. A version of the story appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in the state capital city: The hateful state: Alabama is angry, online and off, study finds.

The lede?

“From the number of hostile online comments to the number shooting deaths, Alabama is one of the most angry and hateful states in the nation, according to a new study.”

There is some good news for people in Alabama in the report ranking the “most sinful states in the U.S.” from the so-called “financial advisory” website WalletHub.

Alabama is only the 15th most sinful state in the country, topped by No. 1 Nevada, followed by Florida, California, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Georgia. Notice many of these states are in the Deep South, once home to the Confederate States of America, where many people like to claim they are “Christians,” but sometimes don’t much act like they know what that actually means.

The report is based on data from federal agencies, including the Census Bureau and the FBI; nonprofit groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center; industry tracking groups and more and ranks states for vice, jealousy, greed, lust, anger and hate.

Apparently Alabama had the fewest problem drinkers in the country per capita, not that many pot smokers (although what’s wrong with that), and only a small number of arrests for prostitution.

The bad news is while Alabama is only No. 6 of all the 50 states for “anger and hate,” it is No. 2 on the list for the number of gun deaths per capita and for the number of filed cases of “discrimination.” It is No. 5 for “hostile internet comments” and No. 8 for the number of violent crimes, many involving guns.

Tennessee, another state I lived in for four years, topped the list for hate, which makes sense from my experience. While I found many intelligent, talented and creative people in East Tennessee in my time there, I also experienced the anger and hate. Anti-government and anti-environment radical terrorists, probably in the KKK, burned down my house in Knoxville, just because I wrote about environmental problems for the local alternative weekly and taught a class on environmental journalism at the University of Tennessee.

There were many, many angry people there who owed their livelihoods to the federal government, who for some inexplicable reason hated the federal government, and voted against their own economic interests on a regular basis.

Tennessee was followed on the list in the anger and hate category by a tie for No. 2 between Georgia and Arkansas, No. 3 Alaska, No. 4 Montana and No. 5 Louisiana. I can also see how Louisiana would make the list. There were lots of really poor, uneducated people in Louisiana I found when I lived in New Orleans for four years, who were hated by the white, rich elite — and poor whites in rural parts of the state.

Alabama didn’t score as badly on the study’s other “sin” themed categories like “greed,” “lust” and “vanity,” although it showed there are more retail opioid prescriptions for pain killers dispensed in Alabama per capita than in any other state.

And it seems the people of Alabama seem to like spending quite a lot of time looking at pornographic sites on the internet. I mean what else are you going to do in a state where there’s not much to do for fun and people expect you to get married before you have sex?

There’s probably a correlation here with another recent study that showed five cities in Alabama made the list of the 50 worst places to live in the country based on crime rates, poverty levels, job markets, property values and access to entertainment and cultural attractions.

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I don’t think these are the things Mr. Byrne was talking about when he talked about Alabama values. I think what he really meant was Alabama “preferences.” The bar where he announced his candidacy was mostly populated by white males. Here they tend to be pro-big business and pro-capitalism. They tend to be against federal, state and local government regulations even on air and water pollution, and health and safety standards in the work place. They don’t seem to believe that poor people of color deserve health care or federal and state aid for food so they can eat even if they can’t find a job or are physically unable to work.

These are certainly not “Christian values,” because according to the values one would take away from reading about what Jesus supposedly advocated in the New Testament, Christ’s values included feeding the sick and helping the poor and clothing the naked. Letting sick old people and poor children die for lack of food and health care may very well be “Alabama values,” but these are not the same as “Christian values.”

So let’s get real. Jesus didn’t hate people because of the color of their skin (I mean he was a brown Palestinian Jew, right?) and he didn’t like the idea of poor people dying for lack of food or health care. He also advocated people paying their civil taxes. “Render unto Caesar…” Right?

It is understandable that people don’t like paying taxes, but this is not just an Alabama value. It seems the president of the United States doesn’t pay any taxes on his billions, and neither does Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Washington Post. Not paying taxes appears to be an American value, one that may destroy us in the end. You can’t govern a place without the money to pay for roads and bridges, police and fire fighters, teachers, doctors, nurses, soldiers, spies, park rangers and yes bureaucrats to run things.

If you want to resort to anarchy and chaos, to go back to living in the Dark Ages, and advocate for a system of extreme social darwinism, which is what the Republicans here seem to advocate at least at election time, don’t be shocked if people rise up and fight you at the ballot box to change things.

What we need in this state and country is some real leadership from politicians who will explain what’s really important to people, and this is just as lacking among Democrats as Republicans here and elsewhere.

In the 2020 election, what you are going to see play out in the mainstream media on TV is a battle between supposedly anti-government, “conservative Christian” Republicans and so-called “godless” and “socialist” Democrats. Some Republicans may go so far as to equate the Democrats with the Communists, all while the president himself is clearly in league with Russia, for four decades the biggest Communist threat to American democracy.

It does make your head spin, doesn’t it?

But that’s not really what’s going on. I don’t know a single Democrat who wants to eliminate private property ownership in the U.S. or to outlaw religion. That’s what the Communists advocated, led by the writer and philosopher Karl Marx.

Most industrialized democracies in the world now are in fact socialist democracies. That is they allow for private ownership of property and business, while regulating industry and providing some modicum of aid for the sick and the poor.

If Alabama really wants to uphold “Christian values,” some politician here would stand up and go on television and explain to the people of this state the value of expanding Medicaid and adequately funding public education. Not just to help poor white and black people stay alive and have a chance in the economy. But to help everybody here, since it would provide many new high paying jobs in the health care and education fields and prevent rural hospitals and urban schools from having to close down.

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In other words, it would be good for business. It would help the state recruit more industry too. It would help the state have value — not just to Alabamians, but to the United States of America.

Then maybe the people around this country would stop laughing at Alabama and hating people here for being so angry, hateful and stupid — not just for winning the NCAA college football national championship almost every year.