I wasn’t sure how to re-inaugurate my blog and so I asked the people on Twitter to give me some suggestions and they nailed it in one. 

The results of this Twitter poll split the results between talking about Cop City and my favorite places to hang out in Atlanta.

For me, a guy that loves hanging out places, it raised a few questions.  

Because places? Shit, that’s real estate. Where are you going, how much does it cost to be there, how many people can come with you?

I’m a Corona lifestyle guy – anywhere where there’s a cold beer and an interesting conversation, I can probably make myself comfortable. 

But whenever I leave a gas station or a laundromat or an arcade, or a pizza place in town and I step back into the heat, it is like walking into a furnace.

I mean it’s always been hot, but the heat in Atlanta the last couple of years has been maddening. If you’re not inside with an air conditioner a few feet away, you can feel your brain sizzling like a plate of hash browns.

I’d be lying if I said the actual climate didn’t impact where I hung out this year.

It’s basically impossible to think of cool places in town without thinking – here’s a city that’s in extreme need of green space and less concrete cover that’s taken the city over over the last 40-plus years.

What Is Cop City?

So, Cop City – it’s bulldozing a big portion of DeKalb County to help the local police practice surveillance tools and take military style training for “urban warfare” scenarios. And when we say “urban warfare” we mean “civil rights protests”. 

The funding is $90 million, a third is from the taxpayers and two-thirds are from corporate sponsors.

Very few people in town like this idea, but they’re running into a problem – 

There is so much money in letting yourself get yelled at by large groups of people. You used to be able to see it on Twitter before Elon Musk chased off anyone interesting. Now that the blue checks are getting paid directly, the unwitting participants got a little more witting. 

In the case of the Atlanta city council. 

You can form a 12 hour line and yell at these guys for their lack of humanity – literally. But they’re politicians, which means they’re all getting paid fantastic amounts of money specifically to absorb negative attention. 

It’s their way of signaling loyalty for when it’s time to collect those sweet jobs in the private sector in a few years, when they’re distant memories and we are all a couple degrees hotter when we step out of the gas station.

It’s not very funny but Democrats turn into Republicans as soon as they get a working majority anywhere – I spent years talking to blue state democrats for my podcast and it was the case across the country.

So if you’re looking for ways to talk to the city council about all this – I wouldn’t bother, unless you’re trying to depress someone who thinks politicians care about people.

What if you’re talking to someone else?

That’s more interesting.

I spoke to a 55-year old woman last week who told the Atlanta Police kill fewer black people than other cities – and there are too many homeless people. 

People are smart about politics. Maybe they care about politics less than your average social media poster, and maybe they’ve 

But people kind of understand what they’re voting for. 

(Check on your 55 year olds. They’re not okay.)

There are three main arguments I’ve heard talking to people who think this is a good idea in real life. The internet will tell you there aren’t any Cop City supporters, but they typically say stuff like:

“The land’s not in use.”

There’s no such thing as junk land, especially in this heat.

Isn’t it hot right now? 

Why does every block of Atlanta need to be covered in concrete? We don’t have an overabundance of trees.

We’ve got enough traffic, sure.

We’ve got enough megamalls.

Are you are living your entire life inside of the air conditioning, driving to work and coming back home?

Who’s living through (gesturing wildly) all of this and thinking, boy we need less trees? 

You’ll also hear (depending on how blatant the person you’re working with feels about it) that opposition to this is astroturfed.

Luckily the “outside agitators” perspective has got so much raw civil rights era inhumanity that you really just need to slowly repeat it to them. 

But doesn’t Georgia want to be a bellweather state? 

But ay. “Georgia’s a bellwether state”. These guys are all proud of their national relevance now, so it doesn’t take much to reframe this as an idea of being a national model. And the mayor and city council are looking at this as a national model and are looking to export this to other places.

You’ve gotta remember that most people are mostly interfacing with this issue through the local news, which along with the city government and the corporate legion of doom that sponsors the city, is the third leg of support for a mega compound.

So, instead of talking about protestors from out of town (a shadowy group of people who you can’t speak for or to), just talk about what it means nationally to export urban warfare training centers across the country.

And fine, if you can get someone who says out loud, yeah I think corporations should build military training facilities across the country – some people are too far gone.

Ah, now it’s a tougher nut to crack when people are like, yes, unlimited militarization and money is great. Sign me up. 

But when you’re looking at a whopping 90 million dollars that can be spent anywhere else, man… support is soft. Anybody can think of anything they’d rather have in town for $90 million, or even $30 million.

I can’t help but think about the WellStar Atlanta Medical Center that closed down this year because it wasn’t making enough money.  It’s a level one trauma center in the middle of Atlanta.  How much money should it need to make?

https://atlanta.capitalbnews.org/amc-board-next-steps/

They moved to Augusta to “attract a wealthier patient base” and served up a bunch of word soup in the meantime. 

And you can do this for anything. School lunches. Teachers. Public pools. Public housing. Public transportation.

Support for a boondoggle of that scale really relies on people supporting it without thinking about it, which is why actually talking to people 1 to 1 really moves the needle.

Don’t you WANT the police to be better trained?

This is usually the last thing you’ll hear. 

Definitely better training is one of those words where everybody gets to imagine whatever words or whatever image comes to their imagination.  Barack Obama made tons of political hay using words like this. 

And actually, you don’t want that. Nobody wants that. 

The police are already trained. 

The problem is they’ve got too many weapons and too much political leverage to get more weapons. 

And because of that, their idea of “better” is probably different than your idea of “better”.

They need checks and balances more than they need extra training. They’re getting a third of the city budget. 

And with violent crime down in the city –

There has to be some kind of end point to this endless cycle of wasting money, arresting people, and using the arrest to waste more money.

If you’ve got something that doesn’t take food out of a kids mouth, like a PowerPoint presentation? Or if you want to paint the guns mauve and then folks might be embarrassed to wave it around? Show it to me.

If you take a political structure your comfortable with, that uses your verbiage of choice, and then ask like – who is doing the work, who is making the money, what part of town are they from? You’ll reliably get to the heart of any operation. 

Probably the people mentioning firefighting are the most credulous people in the pile. Just ignore them.

Anyway, being someone who actually was born in Atlanta and is from here talking about Atlanta politics feels like a novelty. 

Sign whatever petitions going around. If you’ve got a couple of extra days this month, go knock some doors for it. Don’t be ashamed to talk about it. 

A big secret of life – when it comes to anything worth saying or acting on, there’s always someone who knows it’s true, but needs to hear it from you in particular.

And the good news about the whole situation is – they are never gonna build that thing.

More people signed the petition against Cop City than have voted for him for mayor.

The politicians that sees the opportunity to replace him won’t be smarter or more principled, but they will see which way the wind is blowing and say the right words at the right time. 

Anyway – that was fun, back to being at PLACES.