Who will we thank next year? Those who fought

A crowd at the Alabama Statehouse listens to Corrin O’Brien of the Fight for Alabama Families Coalition speaker during a rally for protections for in vitro fertilization on Feb. 28, 2024 in Montgomery, Alabama. The rally took place prior to scheduled committee hearings in the Alabama Legislature on legislation to protect the procedure. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)

Anticipatory obedience, a term we will all be familiar with by Jan. 20, describes how major figures and institutions appease an authoritarian before he takes power.

It’s hard to maintain a straight posture against threats and coercion, particularly if you think no one else will stand with you.

So they bow and scrape, hoping it will spare them pain or punishment. They pull punches. They accommodate. They hope to maintain what used to be normal life.

That doesn’t buy peace or protection. If anything, it makes horrible things more likely to occur.

Take it from Alabama: a regime rooted in cruelty will never accept humility. It wants enemies. It seeks targets. Attacks are all it knows.

They always start with the marginalized. Like immigrants (less than 4% of the state population) and transgender people (less than 0.5% of Alabama’s population).

But the regime will go to war with anyone — educators, health care providers, you name it — believing the world is a battlefield and they’re about to be overrun.

This is why Alabama finds itself three years into a program of shoving transgender people out of public spaces. That’s why we’ve launched legalized harassment of anyone attempting to teach basic history.

We’ve banned abortion care because Alabama infantilizes grown women. We’ve got a state Supreme Court filled with allegedly “pro-life” people who signed off on six executions this year, the most in the state in over a decade. Three of them involved a new method of killing people which has repeatedly proved to be torturous. Eight of the nine justices on that august body threw fertility treatments into chaos, with the most cursory acknowledgment of what they had done.

And our leaders have greeted rampant violence in state prisons with a shrug and a hope that a bigger prison can set things right.

This cruelty wins elections in Alabama. The powerful in this state know how to make their hateful obsessions and first-world problems into Horrifying Crises that white Alabamians — even those lacking the power — prioritize at the polling place.

We are ruled by grievance. And all we get from Montgomery is grief.

Now we’ll see this play out on the federal level. The incoming administration will try to gut Medicaid, a foundation of Alabama health care, in 2025. That won’t only affect the children, elderly and disabled Alabamians who make up the vast majority of Medicaid recipients. It will send many rural hospitals into tailspins. It’s likely to force many pediatric offices to close.

You can’t count on our state leaders to stop this. They surrendered to President-elect Donald Trump a long time ago. You may vote for them, but they view the president as their only constituent.

And meekly submitting and hoping for the best — anticipatory obedience — won’t help, either.

But five weeks before the start of 2025, I’m thinking of something else. Call it anticipatory gratitude.

I’m grateful for all who will defend our fellow Americans.

I’m thankful for the parents of transgender children fighting to protect their kids. Attacks on gender-affirming care are attempts to make someone’s subjective values more important than the needs of an individual. Those parents standing up for their kids battle for us, working to prevent our medical system from operating entirely on dumb prejudice.

I’m grateful for the IVF patients and health care providers battling for access to fertility treatments. They stalled the Alabama Supreme Court’s attack on those programs. Relentless litigation and Republican politicians’ need to drop everything to indulge the far-right voter (anticipatory obedience!) mean IVF isn’t safe. But it’s still here because Alabama families and health care professionals did more than sigh at the ruling.

And how about the educators? I foresee more fights over telling the truth even when it inconveniences some online edgelord. The teachers who insist on sharing history as it happened and science as it works will throw a sandbag against the flood of propaganda.

Here’s to the health care providers who have to defend public funding and access to vaccines.

This is already an unhealthy state, and those who fight for every Alabamian to have access to the best care possible call us to do better by our neighbors.

And thank you to every single Alabamian who will stand up for the state’s immigrant communities. The person who extends a hand and raises a voice in the face of mass deportation connects us to a kinder future. That’s true patriotism.

Will these brave people stop what’s coming? No. We’re going to have to be ready. A fetal crouch won’t protect us.

But if we’re still standing on Thanksgiving Day 2025, it’s because these people, and many more, stiffened their backs and made it hard to hurt our neighbors.

And on that day, we will owe them much more than our gratitude.