This is an opinion column. And a letter to my father.

Hey Dad.

It’s been too long since I wrote. I’m sorry. I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, what with dying and all. There are things I’ve needed to tell you, but I just haven’t had the heart.

Remember when you were in the hospital, near the end, and people paraded in to see you? You’d say “Heaven’s my home, but I ain’t homesick,” and everyone would laugh. But mostly you.

I think it’s best you went home when you did. You were ready. And the world is, well, different.

We have artificial intelligence now. People seem to prefer it to the real stuff.

Professors tell me students don’t really read books anymore. AI boils all those words into bits so they just get the hot points. Sort of like the way politicians do to the Bible.

Professors are out of fashion right now. Like scientists, librarians, journalists, historians, independent judges and ethics. We don’t rely on experts anymore, either. We have “influencers,” whose expertise is determined by how entertaining they are. Or how loud they can get. Billionaires are in, I guess. And Christian Nationalists.

We’re at each other’s throats. Again. And I have bad news.

That Methodist church you devoted your whole life to — like your dad and his dad before him? It split. Half the churches said they wanted “open hearts, open minds, open doors.” And the other half chose better locks.

It’s sort of the story of our country now.

Your alma mater, Birmingham Southern College? It’s gone. It got itself into money trouble — sort of like that PACT program Kay Ivey used to run — and the state didn’t want to throw it a lifeline. “Liberal arts colleges” are less popular than lawyers now. I guess they’re on a par with climate scientists.

Remember when my car broke down in Orlando and that guy took it apart and laid all the pieces on the lawn? He put it back together, mostly, but it never ran right again. That’s what I keep thinking about.

Because we have a new president – the guy from “The Apprentice,” which I know you didn’t watch. He talks a lot about how bad America is, so he’s breaking it apart. Like my old car.

People who love the guy really love the guy. That’s why he’s president. Again. A lot of people are worried, though.

The president’s only been back in office a week and he’s already done so much to take things apart that nobody can follow it.

He wants to make Canada a state and build a wall between us and Mexico. He wants to claim Greenland and rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. All that seems like a lot of distraction to keep us from watching something else, like in a magic show or pro wrestling.

He’s gonna use the military to kick immigrants out, separate families, refuse refugees from other countries and declare that being born in America isn’t enough to make you a citizen anymore. He scrapped all kinds of diversity programs, rolled back protections for gay people, turned back the clock on civil rights. His admirers say he’s chosen by God to do it all.

It’s a lot to take in. Even for those of us who still have a pulse.

I was thinking about you because I know how much you cared about the earth. You used to preach, from your pulpit, the dinner table and on our vacations, about how it was our duty to God and to humanity to be good stewards of the planet.

We have a lot of natural disasters now because of climate change. More even than scientists predicted. But people don’t want to hear it.

The president pulled America out of the Paris Climate Accords and wiped out guidelines for studying climate change. He threatened to withhold disaster assistance to states he doesn’t like, and now he’s talking about dismantling FEMA.

I think people would rather get cheap stuff on the internet than acknowledge the climate problem. But then, the president has a billionaire pal who is the richest guy in the world. He badly wants to go to Mars, so maybe a few of us will end up there. Then Earth can go the way of your alma mater.

You must have a lot of afterlife stuff to do, so I won’t get into how it’s harder to enroll in Medicaid or get insurance than it was two weeks ago, or how the Supreme Court is about to decide whether it’s OK to have religious public schools. I know you’d hate that because you took your religion so seriously. You knew how scary it could be when any old yokel starts telling kids what their god does or doesn’t want out of them.

I admit I didn’t stay awake through all your sermons, and I’m sorry about that, but I went back and read some this week. They were pretty good. You talked a lot about caring for outcasts and beggars, for lepers and tax collectors and refugees and sex workers and people who are easy to dismiss. You talked about why it’s so important for people to try to be like the guy they named their religion after.

I really thought about you when an Episcopal bishop said a lot of that stuff to the president’s face on inauguration day last week.

She spoke up for immigrants and minorities and others.

“In the name of our God,” she said softly, “I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

You’d have thought she questioned his manhood. The president later said she was bad at her job, that she was “nasty in tone.” His supporters said a whole lot worse. Some called her a heretic on national TV, and a preacher said the bishop didn’t know her Bible because you’re supposed to respect your government and the laws.

Starting … Now!

Did I mention the president pardoned 1,500 people who broke into the Capitol, smashed up the place and beat the police with sticks because they refused to accept an election he didn’t win? It was crazy. People died.

The people that called that bishop a heretic would call her whole theology “woke.”

You might not understand the term. You might think it means stay awake and pay attention to what’s really happening around you, and try to understand how we got to this place in history. You might think being aware is a good thing, that if we really say all people are to be treated as equal, we ought to understand that some folks got a limo ride to opportunity while others hack through centuries of brambles to no avail.

But “woke” turned into a huge political wedge. Like “commie” in the 50s, maybe. As long as we have labels for people they are easy to discredit.

I know this is a lot. And I haven’t forgotten that you’re dead, so there’s not much you can do about it. But I hoped talking to you would help me figure things out.

I did read some of your old sermons, like I said, hoping they’d have some wisdom. I didn’t always appreciate what it must have been like to preach about loving others amid the shrapnel of Bombingham in the 1950s and ‘60s.

I think I have a better idea now.

I read one from January of 1962. It was the month Birmingham closed its parks to keep from having to integrate them. It was the month Klan bombs went off at three different Black churches in Birmingham. Three more bombings that would never be solved.

You spoke that day about kindness. I have thought, many times, that you should have said it more clearly. More forcefully. With more authority.

But kindness seems pretty important now.

“This world is starving for kindness,” you said from your pulpit in that place, in that critical moment. “At the present time it is like a cowed puppy, licking its wounds and longing for someone to care.”

That helped me, Dad, I wanted to tell you. Because “a cowed puppy, licking its wounds and longing for someone to care” changes nothing. Nothing. It simply takes what is given, mewls for more and fades into a corner.

We, too, are in a critical place, in a critical moment, and the temptation is strong to find such a corner. I won’t do it, Dad. It is not the time to act the puppy.

Miss you,

John

PS: Say hi to Mom for me, but don’t tell her about the AI stuff. I know she’d worry. She used to tell us we’d never be closer to our Creator than in the act of creation. Art, literature, bridges, people. When we build stuff we fulfill ourselves, and maybe our purpose. She wouldn’t want to turn that over to machines.

John Archibald is a columnist for AL.com and a two-time Pulitzer winner, though he did sleep through many of his father’s sermons.