Frustration, destruction and creation

It was a week of frustration in general at my house on multiple fronts. A plumbing repair sent us a week without a bathtub. The iPhone update broke the older model phones I had for the kids, leaving one without cell reception at all. We’ve spent hours trying to make the phones that worked last week work again, and will likely just have to pay for new devices as replacements. Then there was the endless red tape of dealing with the college board for everything my older kid needs to try and continue her education. I also had the routine American phone tree tangle for routine health care things. Between the iPhones dying, the higher ed red tape, and health care, I probably have spent at least twenty hours on the phone, and sent somewhere north of two dozen emails to variations of customer service in the last week. When multiple facets of your life just refuse to operate as you’ve been told they should, it’s not a great day-to-day experience. Clearly, my only antidote for the overkill of consumer denial was to do something deeply odd with craft supplies. I made a point to myself to spend as much time making art with other people this week as I did dealing with customer service. I clocked around twenty-five hours of communal creation time. I will clock more this week as part of my grieving process over Cop City.

When I saw the drone footage of how many trees had been removed from the old prison farm woods - what everyone now properly calls Weelaunee forest - I felt sick and immediately angry. This is my generation’s Stone Mountain, a tragedy cut into a natural space, a ruin of nature that will never stop being the source of arguments and protests and violence. Just like the annual fights over the maintenance and symbolism of Stone Mountain, the protests and potential for bloodshed will always haunt Cop City. If you think people in Georgia will forget what happened on that spot, ask the protestors down in Columbus about The School of the Americas.

The protests will never stop. There will always be incredible security costs associated with these ventures that only the wealthy want and push ahead against the wishes of voters. The hubris and money behind these misbegotten ideas last a few generations until the inevitable weight of history bending toward justice eventually forces some positive change. This week it was announced Fort Gordon near the city I was born will be renamed Fort Eisenhower in the next year or so. I have hope that I’ll live to see maintenance on the Stone Mountain carving stop, and whatever they build in Weelaunee repurposed to something that will actually benefit the city. Given how long it’s taken to get the name Fort Eisenhower though, it might be my grandkids that see the change. When people ask me why I bother to protest, or write about protesting, it’s because I know at some point when I’m old a kid will ask me what I did to stop the nonsense that happened in my lifetime.

I’ll say. I signed petitions, and I voted, and I showed up to some meetings. We knew it wouldn’t work because we weren’t wealthy, but it was the only thing we could do at the time so we did. The best change I could effect was just to show up on the right side, but by the time I was born physical protests were no longer effective. We had to wait, and wave signs ineffectually, and teach our kids things could be better, eventually. To keep ourselves sane we made art, and found friends we could laugh and cry with, and pushed forward. When I look back over my two decades of blogs, some of the stuff I’m proudest of were the protests.

That the protests I’ve attended for my entire adult life have made NO material difference to any government plan cooked up by billionaires makes no difference to me. For the last decade, when I do go out to community actions it’s for no reason other than my own satisfaction - to say I tried - and to physically push out against the despair. So basically, it’s the same reason I vote, or make art, or do anything. You either believe in a better city, a better state, and a better society, or you don’t. I’m sure the men with money who do the terrible things I protest and vote against tell themselves the same thing. The difference is that eventually I will be right, and though we may both be long dead before the damage is undone, I will die knowing I pissed on their graves.

Lockdowns Lower Grades

The only thing that upset me about the mass shooting this week was my entire lack of reaction outside of annoyance at the disruption of the school schedule. We can all get shot at any time. I wish this wasn’t the case, but I feel most angry that my kids probably have lower grades as a result.

This week, less than two miles from the High School my children attend, a man with a gun shot a bunch of people in a medical waiting room. It wasn’t the first time this school year that gun violence meant the school was on lockdown, and so for me, sitting another mile away from the event, I was just annoyed more than anything. I was actually surprised when a relative called to check if we were ok, because I didn’t know the shooting had made the national news and was confused as to why it would.

I want to be clear that my lack of reaction to the violence was not because I live in downtown Atlanta. Gun violence, and violence in general, has happened all around me for the last three decades. Around the turn of the century, a man in middle Tennessee crawled out of ceiling tiles at a fast food restaurant and killed all the young people while they were counting out the registers. This happened right before I left Tennessee for good, and cemented my feeling that if someone with a gun wanted to kill me, there was nothing I could do about it. The man who killed those restaurant workers was never caught.

If you’re around violence enough - and we are, as Americans, all the time - you just kind of get used to it. The first few times my children’s schools went on lockdown, I worried. After I really thought it through though, I quit panicking, because I feel like my children’s schools are secure from *outside* threats. This is of course naive, given what happened in Nashville a few months ago and Uvalde not quite a year ago. Still, ever since those people my own age were killed closing up a fast food restaurant for less than a thousand dollars, I haven’t been able to be scared by potential gun violence.

Sometimes when I’m in a crowd - any crowd, any time - the thought that a crazy person could start spraying bullets randomly creeps into the back of my head. But I love crowds. I love concerts and parades and DragonCon. So do I stay inside and deny myself the basic human joy that comes from participating in society, or do I shove the fact that I live in a very violent society to the back of my mind and get on with life? I think every American knows the answer to this question, even as they pull their kids out of public life and into homeschooling in record numbers.

As the search for the missing shooter Wednesday went on, less than two miles from the High School, less than three miles from our town home, around four miles from the husband’s office, we just got on with our lives. The violence did disrupt the kids' education though. My older daughter needed to talk to her Biology professor, but that period of the day was canceled. My younger daughter was supposed to attend a math study group in advance of the state milestone testing after school, but that study group was canceled. No one at the High School was directly hurt by bullets, but we can safely assume both my kids had their grades impacted by the lockdown as a direct result.

When the shooter was caught north of the city in Cobb county, I hope people realized that living downtown wasn’t any more inherently dangerous than living outside the city, where the man was caught. I doubt that idea got through to anti-urban die-hards though. I bet though, just like most Americans, that every time conservative rural or suburban residents are in a crowd they know how easy it would be for someone to start spraying bullets. Gun violence can happen anywhere, at any time. Your young adult closing a fast food restaurant, your attendance at a country music concert, your doctor’s office waiting room. Anywhere, anytime.

I hate that it lowers test scores when this happens, because I can't do anything about the violence. I've marched. I've signed petitions. I've voted. Now I just have to wait for the kids - and I hope it's the millennials, that we don't have to wait for Gen Z - to actually make the change happen. I hope my grandkids aren't going through lockdowns like this. Those lockdowns really do lower your grades.