My grandpa used to say that a man with a watch can tell you what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure. Although timekeeping is more precise now than when watches had to be wound regularly, knowing the time is as confusing today as it has ever been. Of course, there are plenty of people who will tell you with great certainty what time it is, but I learned long ago that those who are most certain are very often most wrong.
One of the things I enjoy most about retirement is having more time for reflection and circumspection. Although there are many things I wish I’d have done differently, the path I took looks much better in hindsight than it did when I was often struggling through it, often blindly. My service to the State of Alabama was made possible by a federal court ruling by Judge Frank Johnson that ruled the Alabama State Troopers’ height and weight restrictions unconstitutional. At 5’4” and 135 lbs., I wouldn’t have even been close, but I quickly learned that size didn’t matter nearly as much as commitment and common sense. For what it’s worth, Judge Johnson was an independent-minded Republican from Haleyville in what was once known as the “Free State of Winston” and one of Gov. George Wallace’s major foes when “segregation now, segregation forever” was one of the mantras of the right-wing populist movement in Alabama.
After 8 years of successful service in the Highway Patrol Division, I was assigned to serve as a criminal investigator in the Major Crimes Unit of the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, where I served another 17 years before retiring from law enforcement when I was elected to the Alabama Legislature. Of all the things I’ve done, nothing has been more challenging, intriguing, and intrinsically rewarding to me than criminal investigation. During those years, I learned to think for myself, question everything, and follow the evidence wherever it led in the relentless pursuit of truth and justice. Although I brought many cases to a successful conclusion, I also learned that finding answers always brings more questions.
Investigative thinking teaches us to recognize how little we know. Good investigators have an endless supply of unanswered questions dangling in their minds like loose electrical wires needing to make a connection and complete the circuit that illuminates the truth. My insatiable thirst for truth eventually forced me to conclude that God alone is its sole proprietor, and the best we can do is diligently search for it and humbly accept what we are given willingly, whether we like it or not, while recognizing that there’s always more that we don’t know.
It was likely a mix of ego, outrage, and curiosity that drew me into the political realm, and it wasn’t long before I became adept at navigating within it. But it took a while to clearly see how different political thinking is from investigative thinking. The thirst for truth and justice is the driving force in the mind of a good investigator, however, the driving force in the political world is power, not truth or justice. I don’t mean to imply that those virtues don’t matter in politics, only that they are not the driving force. Whether they will admit it or not, politicians almost always try to manipulate truth and justice for the sake of power, regardless of political affiliation. It’s an ugly truth that I strongly resisted for many years, but experience forced me to eventually accept. And justice always follows truth.
Although I made many friends and had some good times during my 20 years of legislative service from 2002-2022, I spent a great deal of that time on my knees alone because of an internal conflict between the investigator and the politician churning within me. During the first 8 years of my legislative career, when my political party was a super minority, those opposing sides of my thought process seemed to get along with one another, since the primary purpose of a minority party in our political system should be speaking truth to power.
Truth is the most powerful political weapon in the arsenal of an effective minority party, followed by a strong understanding of the rules and the ability to use them strategically to their advantage. However, the rules are limited in their political value to the minority because they are instituted and implemented by the majority to help them maintain order and control while giving the appearance of fairness, so they can always break them or change them if they have the votes and enough arrogance. In the political world, fairness is a façade.
The powers of this world can suppress truth, but truth does not die. Once its seeds are planted in the right places, they will reemerge when they are watered with the faith of those who believe in it. But if we truly embrace truth and justice, we must also recognize that they are inseparable and operate on their own timetable, not ours.
Like many others, I celebrated when my party took power in 2010, but it did not turn out as I hoped. After a few years of some success implementing meaningful policy reforms, particularly improvements surrounding fiscal management, a series of scandals and ethical lapses engulfed the highest echelons of our state government. Despite having been in politics for many years, my mind refused to transform itself from investigator to politician, at least not completely. During the years that followed, my passion for truth and justice grew as my interest in politics declined. My appetite for politics waned to the point that I was compelled to retire from elected office.
I recognize the necessity of politics to avoid the oppression of chaos and provide structure to a society, but I am also intimately aware of the danger of the arrogance that accompanies power and continually tempts even those with the best intentions to misuse and abuse it. Politics is an ugly, messy game, and there are those who absolutely love it. I do not believe most of those people fully understand it for what it is, but those who do and still love it are likely to have psychopathic personalities.
There are others who find it distasteful but are still willing to engage in it out of a sense of duty and service, with a cooperative spirit, eager to seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Those are the statesmen, the servant-leaders. They are the ones who humbly strive to make the political apparatus work in the face of the political wolves. They seldom get the positive attention they deserve and are often targets of ridicule and blame. My hat’s off to them. They are usually the ones who get the work done while the political bluster goes on in the public eye. They love truth and justice more than politics, and those moral values are non-partisan.
