CONFEDERATE FLAG

A huge Confederate flag is raised over the southbound side of Interstate 65 in Verbena, Ala., north of Montgomery Sunday afternoon, June 26, 2005. (AP Photo/The Birmingham News, Jerry Ayres)

(JERRY AYRES)

I don't know at what point, on my drives to Montgomery, I began to ignore that giant Confederate battle flag flapping beside the interstate.

At first, when I saw it, I imagined all the folks who aren't from here seeing it as they passed through, and I imagined the things they were thinking about us here in Alabama because of it.

Eventually, though, I resigned myself to it -- figuring it was just one of the things about this place that I'd never be able to change -- and its significance began to fade until it was just one more landmark measuring the miles I had left until I reached the capital.

But Thursday morning, it changed again, as I rode to Montgomery for a press conference there, all the while listening to the radio's accounts of the tragedy that had happened in Charleston, S.C., and the description of the young man who had committed this horrible act.

We ignore this thing -- or worse, embrace it. Not the flag exactly, but something else it represents.

Painful insignificance

I don't like to write or even talk much about religion or spirituality, because I've found that unless you're a preacher, it's a hard thing to do without sounding like some kind of kook.

But I've come to realize that at some point in all of our lives we begin to see just how big this universe is and we compare ourselves to it. When we make that comparison, it's hard not to feel indescribably small. And as we get older, we realize just how brief a moment we have to live in it, and we feel smaller, still. There is a painful insignificance that hits you -- a sense that none of what we do really means anything.

To allay that pain, some of us turn to religion for reassurance. Others try to ignore it by burying themselves in their work or embracing a hedonistic pursuit of material things.

And then there is politics -- and there are people in politics who prey on that insecurity we all carry.

How Wallace worked

Recently I thought back to something Rick Bragg wrote about seeing George Wallace when Bragg was a child in north Alabama. Bragg then was in Wallace's target audience -- poor, rural and white. Wallace, he said, told them that they were better than somebody else, and the important thing here is that nobody had ever told them that before.

On some level, we all fear our lives mean nothing, and there is a kind of politician who preys on that, exploits it, and then walks away when there are consequences.

Flying on the roadside for the last ten years, the flag had faded in my mind from something that made me mad to just another landmark on my way to Montgomery. (AP Photo/The Birmingham News, Frank Couch)

It's an easy formula, and once you know how to look for it, you can see it everywhere. Nazi Germany is an easy place to recognize it. The segregated South gets a little too close to home, but as long as we comfort ourselves by saying that's all in the past, we can sometimes acknowledge it.

But it is still with us now.

The late Republican political strategist Lee Atwater summed it up years ago in an interview when he encapsulated the Southern Strategy.

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N----r, n----r, ni----r.'" Atwater said. "By 1968 you can't say 'n----r'--that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites."

Life means more

I thought about this recently after I had reflected on all the politicians I'd heard boast about their family values. My wife and I are about to have a child, and like many soon-to-be parents, we had been doing the back-of-the-envelope math, figuring out just what it would take to give him the life we want him to have. And as daunting as that was, the more horrible realization was that we are so much luckier and more blessed than most of the people living in this state to be able to give him as much as we can.

And those politicians preaching family values? They'd done diddly squat to help those folks. All that talk about family values -- it's that same message. That lady at the checkout line you saw buying groceries with food stamps -- you're better than her. Single moms and deadbeat dads -- you're better than them, and I'm just like you.

Hate is seductive, and it's hardest to recognize in ourselves. But the lesson of Birmingham and the lesson now of Charleston is that the more we let our politicians stoke that hate, the more likely something horrible like this is to happen.

We must remind ourselves every chance we get that the insignificance we might feel means something different. Yes, the universe is big and we are small, but from what we know about it, life is rare.

And it is precious.