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Every state in America has these silly and often highly ironic tag lines. For example, Georgia calls itself the peach state despite the fact that South Carolina produces more, and by most accounts, better, peaches than Georgia. None of these is quite as ironic as Alabama though, which calls itself "Alabama the beautiful", presumably because the more accurate "Alabama the shithole" was bad for business.
I've had the general misfortune of spending roughly two weeks of my life in various parts of Alabama, north, central, south, coast and now barrier island. It has all had the potential to be very beautiful, but alas the denizens of Alabama had already turned it all to crap long before I got there.
If you need any firsthand insight into the advantages of turning land over to federal management, just head to Dauphin Island, which has no federally managed land, and then head over to Gulf Islands National Seashore, which as the name suggests is managed by the National Park Service.
For further contrast consider the campgrounds at each place. For $28 in Gulf Islands you get a nice clean camp site with 50 AMP, 30 Amp and 20 Amp hookups, along with good fresh water. Every day at 9 AM ranger comes and cleans the bathroom.
For $42 a night at Dauphin Island Park & Beach Board you get a tiny sliver of land that hasn't ever been leveled, will more than likely have giant roots you'll need to navigate and a picnic table so small my three children under five barely fit on one side of it. The electric service will max out at 30Amps and stop working at the first hint of rain. The last time the bathrooms were cleaned at Dauphin Island RV Park Jimmy Carter was president. The beach, which could be quite nice, will, inevitably, courtesy of your neighbors, almost every single one of whom will be from Alabama, be covered in trash, beer cans and whatever refuse happened to be used while said neighbors were at the beach. Because to an Alabaman Alabama is nothing so much as a giant trash can.
This actually extends from top to bottom from what I can see. About 25 percent of the local aquarium is more or less a pro-oil propaganda exhibit that spends most of it's time highlighting all the ways in which oil can be cleaned up without ever showing a single picture of what an oil spill of the size of the deep water horizon disaster actually looks like when it rolls ashore, nor mentions the devastation it has done to the local fishing industry which as more or less gone belly up and had to sell out to multinational corps since the accident. It's so breath-taking one-side that you notice it.
Now if you're getting the impression I didn't particularly care for Dauphin Island or Alabama in general that's not necessarily true. The people at Miguel's Beach and Baja were very nice and conspicuously not from Alabama and the beach wasn't bad. Still, if we hadn't been meeting some family down here we'd have left at dawn the day after we got here.
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