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Why would anybody live there?

I have to give a nod to Tom Toles of the Washington Post, a native of Buffalo, N.Y., who explained last weekend - as snow piled in yards and was measured in yards there -- that his hometown is more than snow and misery. He wrote that those who stare at the drifts and see only dreariness miss the best of Buffalo.

I hear ya, Tom. In a much warmer way (thank you Jesus), we can relate. Those of us in sunny Alabama have heard some icy one-liners.

What's 100 feet long with 20 crooked teeth? The line outside the Jefferson County courthouse.

Hilarious.

What's the best thing to see in Alabama? The Georgia line.

Peachy.

A D.C. school even held a "Bama Day" a few years back. Students dressed "like fools" and acted like L'il Abner.

I get it all the time, that I'm in a corrupt city in a corrupt county in a backward state where public money is pumped to private schools where students learn the world is 6,000 years old and dinosaurs were just a way for God to give us plenty of oil to burn. Why live there?

Ah, Buffalo. (Wikimedia Commons)

Corruption is our snow. Bodies of guilty politicians pile up in drifts. History is our snow. We have come down on the wrong side of it too many times. Ignorance is our snow. And not the way we revel in our own ignorance - although there is some of that. The ignorance we have to shovel is the ignorance of those who think of Birmingham only as a corrupt and dead city, and Alabama as a hillbilly comic strip.

"Why would anybody live there?"

Where to begin? I could start with buttermilk biscuits and Sand Mountain sorghum syrup, with the barbecue they still try to rip off on the streets of D.C. , but that's too easy. The "bless your hearts" and the 'fixin' tos" will always make an Alabama boy smile, as will the way Southern women tend to whisper words that might sound ... ugly. ("You know her granddaddy had cancer.")

That's the stuff that comes to mind first, because that's the stuff that speaks to us. Like poetry. The ways and the words of the South are like song for our souls. But that won't get it done for idiots who would turn us all into L'il Abners.

The truth is we live here because we know a different Alabama. It is a place that trained astronauts for the moon and supplied marble for the steps of the U.S. Capitol. It sends doctors to fight AIDS in the prisons of Africa, and gathers researchers from across the globe to fight cancer and diabetes and obesity and other ailments that affect all the world. It builds cars and airplanes and skyscrapers.

It is a place that will gladly serve you haricots verts - even though it would suggest the green beans. It is a place where men and women do fight for justice and for the rights of all, and regular people give more of their income to charity than any other part of the country.

"Why would you live there?"

Why, you'd live here for the same reasons you'd live anywhere. Because of a job. Or family. Or love. Or circumstance. Or simply because it is home, whether the weather is fair or foul.

Any place gets its own version of snowfall. When it comes, as Toles said of Buffalo, you have to dig out with the tools you have.

Somebody - for the life of me I can't recall who - once said she loved Alabama more than anyone else hated it, and that was good enough for her. Because, she said, love always wins.

I can dig that.