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.