In college, I anguished over a future day that riots would hit the streets of Atlanta.
I was mentally preparing myself for the moment that scenes from Ferguson would greet me on Sweet Auburn Ave and Andrew Young International.
When Occupy Wall Street rose out of the economic crisis, hordes of protesters – mostly children of successful brokers and executives – flooded the streets of New York, railing against the very system that raised their priviliged soap boxes, allowing their denouncing cries against structural financial inequality to reach every corner of the national conscience.
Right at the same time, Troy Davis was scheduled for execution in Georgia. At this particular inflection point, the fires of rebellion and anger engulfed Woodruff Park. In a matter of days, the Occupy Movement re-christened their new home “Troy Davis Park”. Soon, Occupy Atlanta hoisted tents and filled them with disaffected youth, homeless old folks, and bored college students looking to embrace a counterculture. For what felt like three months, the space was theirs. Sadly, Troy Davis was executed, and the tent city fell at the hands of Mayor Kasim Reed’s Atlanta Police. By a small miracle, no one died. No unarmed black men gunned down like dogs near Aderhold. No beatdowns of rebellious 20-somethings on Luckie Street or Peachtree Center Avenue.
Somehow, The City Too Busy To Hate kept the anger to a simmer, but nothing more.
At the height of recent racial tensions of the last decade, I feared the worst. After Trayvon Martin, I prayed that the next death wouldn’t be in my city. When they murdered Mike Brown, I pictured the tear gas and fires overwhelming the Georgia Bookstore just up the block from my freshman dorm on Edgewood. When Walter Scott was shot in the back, I imagined angry protesters fighting police outside the Georgia Dome. After Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, and the countless unarmed black men and women murdered by police, I convinced myself that it would only be a matter of time until the streets of Atlanta would be alight in unbridled rage, indignant defiance against oppressive forces hellbent on maintaining the dynamics of Jim Crow and segregation.
Until I didn’t.
When I began working, I slowly lost that fear. Over time, the next shooting brought up anger, frustration, feelings of grief that things didn’t improve. But ultimately, I was preoccupied with bills and loans and building up my credit. I had to keep my head above water.
Even as the president morphed from a thoughtful black statesman to an incoherent orange zealot, I kept my nose to the grind as best I could.
When I least expected it, the powder keg finally detonated. Hell, I forgot the fucker was there in the first place.
The sight of a burned out APD car and huddled masses smashing up the CNN Center jarred me.
As I watched Keisha Lance Bottoms angrily beg her city to cease and desist, the overflowing lava of pent-up hatred I expected to greet me during college suddenly stared back through a tiny laptop screen. I didn’t smell the tear gas, feel the stinging rubber pellets, wince from the ringing within my ears from flash bangs and sirens.
I stood dumbfounded that the moment I once feared on a near daily basis would happen in my lifetime was actually happening.
George Floyd’s murder feels gratuitous, a needless attestation of the current state of the world: festering, oozing, bloviating while bleeding out in the middle of a society-crippling pandemic and economic shitstorm. We lost 103,000 people to COVID-19 in three months, but now we’re reminded that indeed black lives still don’t matter in America? What is this Nietzsche-concocted sick joke that we’re trudging through?
Is this the true 9th circle of Hell? Was Dante wrong after all this time? Or perhaps Milton’s Pandemonium?
Are we really living in a 1984 that fucked Hitler to bequeth us alt-1985 Biff Tannen?
Is this what South Africans felt under apartheid?
Martin Luther King during the “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” days of the civil rights struggle?
The fires destroying buildings in Minneapolis look eerily like the ones that raged in D.C. following Dr. King’s murder. The final-straw rage and lashing-out of the streets echo 1992 L.A. Within the images of the past week, I see America’s vulgar history re-birthed from the poisoned ashes of past failure.
It feels hopeless.
It feels inevitable.
It feels like it won’t end.
I can pretend to say I have hopes for a brighter day sometime down the line, but I’d rather not patronize you.
That’s the world we live in right now.
Fight for something more.
Diary of a Mad Millennial 