As we returned home from visiting our children and grandchildren we were driving along Interstate 81, a lovely north-south passage that keeps us well clear of most major metropolitan areas and their traffic. We had just passed Bristol Virginia/Tennessee and were enjoying the lush green countryside when I saw two reminders of the past.
There, standing high on a hill just to the west was a huge Confederate Battle Flag, overlooking a sign announcing we were on the Al Gore Sr. Memorial Highway. It struck me how closely these two signs of the recent past were connected.
On the one hand, we see a symbol of the civil war, but it stands today as a reminder of the racism that still remains within the human heart, the other is a reminder of how close he and the Democratic party of the South were linked to that symbol.
Al Gore[i] was a career politician who came to the Congress in the mid-1930s, and with a brief exception for a late wartime enlistment, remained there until he lost the 1970 reelection bid. In those years he seemed to take a rather centrist approach, at least for his time. Some of his more notable accomplishments were: suggesting we use nuclear contamination to separate the two Koreas, not signing the “Southern Manifesto” but filibustering and voting against the Civil Rights Act, and being instrumental in the Highway Act that created the interstate system. He lost his 1970 reelection bid when he was accused of being a part of the “liberal conspiracy” for his anti-war stance on the Vietnam conflict.
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