For twenty years, I lived a very few miles from what the international media is wrongfully calling “Cop City,” which, fantasies of tree-sitters with six-figure Hampshire College degrees notwithstanding, has long been a police training center. It is in one of the most crime-blighted parts of the city, where elderly women cower behind barred windows and kick-proofed, metal-screened, barred doors. Believe me, the actual residents want nothing more than more public safety. I once found a little girl thrown from a car after a failed gang initiation, terrified and weeping in a field across from my dangerous neighborhood near “Cop City.” The child, who had been beaten by female gang members no older than she, was maybe 13. She wouldn’t do what the gang wanted her to do, so they beat her viciously and threw her out of a car. I washed the blood off her face and took her home, to her grandmother’s house, which was literally across the street from the disputed training center.
Her grandmother’s brick home was tiny but immaculate. Bars covered all the windows and doors. But in a small, heroic paean to hope, marigolds were neatly planted down the sides of the driveway and sidewalk. Those yellow marigolds, spaced perfectly apart beside crumbling concrete, say everything you really need to know about the planned EMT/fireman/police training center. The grandmother embraced her grandchild and pulled her deep into the house.
The other outcome for that adolescent girl would have been a short life of physical brutalization, pimping, and early death from drug abuse and degradation. Maybe it happened anyway, but what she deserved was yellow marigolds, and, without police, she would have had little chance to avoid that fate.
The trust-fund terrorists know nothing about this world. They know nothing of the need for better training for our city’s fractured EMT services. One of the best and most compelling books I’ve read in recent years is by a former Atlanta EMT. The book, by Kevin Hazard, is called A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back. Kevin Hazard lived near me, in a more respectable Atlanta neighborhood but one where you could still get shot in the heart while out jogging at 5pm, as was one of my running “club” members. We weren’t really a club, just a loose group of people who warned each other of muggings and shootings in Grant Park.
You cannot read Hazard’s book without realizing that paramedics in Atlanta are a wild tribe of underpaid heroes who really need a place for better certification.
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I once actually walked part of the future training facility in waders, showing some officials the deleterious effects whenever Intrenchment Creek (an exposed septic line) overflowed, sending diapers, tampons, toilet paper and other sundries down to where the property abuts Atlanta’s “septic system” with open channels of, you know, diapers, tampons, toilet paper and other sundries.
Now human, trust-fund ANTIFA versions of diapers, tampons, and toilet paper “occupy” these magical woods by hanging from Sweetgum trees in $2,000 tents. They arrived in their R.E.I. skiwear and pseudo-revolutionary Diddo Velma designer gas masks to stop that 13-year-old child from having any sliver of a chance to go the respectable marigold route, not the degraded, pimped-out one.
Don’t tell me the terrorists and others like them give a damn about anything but optics. One is a “media influencer” with a nice house in Pittsburgh (hey, sue her first!). Other hail from .1% communities like Kennebunkport, Maine and Grosse Isle, Michigan. I hope they choke on those Diddo Velmas.
By the way, here is a picture of one part of their “sacred forest,” taken in 1982. Contrary to many media reports, it is not the largest stand of Red Oaks in Atlanta (actually unincorporated DeKalb County). It’s mostly invasive Sweetgums, really the very worst tree, plus underbrush, an abandoned firing range, and other detritus.
I have a few suggestions for those who are tired of Atlanta cops being demonized and shot at as ANTIFA play violent firebombing, tree-spiking, business-window-smashing terrorism in Atlanta.
- Since the mid-80’s, George Soros has been organizing and funding a wide variety of the radical groups from whence these protesters seem to “spontaneously” gather to attack a carefully chosen target. He funnels darker money to the most radical groups through an IRS trick called “re-funding,” in which a nonprofit that doesn’t directly advocate violence can collect anonymous donations and funnel them to more overtly violent organizers as vague “training”grants. Soros is also (possibly illegally) using American-based 501-c3 tax-exempt money to co-ordinate the gathering of violent protesters in the British Guardian through his Open Society Institute (OSI) political journalism project. Legal or not, it may be evidence of RICO intent, upon which appropriate AGs, DAs, Georgia Congresspeople, Atlanta Mayor Dickens, and Governor Kemp should investigate.
- Atlanta and DeKalb County; the severely injured policeman; the police assaulted with firebombs that also blew up a police car; the looted downtown businesses, the scrap collecter whose truck was firebombed, and the site construction workers threatened with violence should also sue individual terrorists and Soros’ OSI on the basis of coordinated support and training for the occupiers. Such coordination may be found through the website Guidestar, which provides free, easily-obtainable 990 nonprofit tax filings from Soros/Open Society groups. OSI itself is, I have to admit, also diligent (if increasingly selective) about providing their 990s. I advise starting with Soros-funded groups such as Ruckus Society, Bread Not Bombs, Cop-Watch, the ACLU, and the National Lawyer’s Guild (NLG). You may also contact me at this blog for more detailed information and research advice: I provide this pro-bono. The Ruckus Society, Cop-Watch, and Bread Not Bombs, for example, all recipents of Soros-funds, teach activists to pretend they are being injured and “can’t breathe” when they are resisting arrest. See, for example, here. Here is my summary of the 2012 riots in Tampa, where the activists and the media colluded to disrupt the city using groups and tactics identical to the ones used in Atlanta. For more background on the strategies of “leaderless” groups such as Bread Not Bombs, see more of my work on these groups here, and here, and here, and here.
- As former Atlanta Assistant Chief of Police (demoted for honesty) Lou Arcangeli has observed, the training site in question has been used for training purposes for decades. Don’t be fooled by terrorists or lazy reporters, or, worst, lazy terrorist reporters who claim that it is an unique urban forest. The well-known Atlanta SWAT officer Julian Spence taught sharpshooting there.
- So, demand that local and international media, as well as politicians (more on that below) use appropriate language. Contact the editors of the AJC, WSB, the Daily Mail, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fox (yes, Fox), CNN (if their phone is still connected), and television stations. Tell them to stop referring to the area as “pristine forest”; to stop calling firebomb-flinging, cop-shooting terrorist occupiers as “protesters” instead of “terrorists” and “rioters.” Ask them to bother to document that the site is actually a longtime police training center with a gun range built decades ago and populated mostly with invasive Sweetgum trees, which, despite the nostalgic title, are dreadful pests.
- Note that black Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, the Atlanta Chief of Police, and even the liberal black Atlanta editorial editor Andre Jackson support the development of the training site, while the terrorists are white, out-of-towner, rapidly aging child-adults with degrees from places like Hampshire College. Here is a very moving editorial by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution editorial editor, Andre Jackson. Jackson writes: “I was waiting in an airport Wednesday night when I saw the news on my phone about the shootings at the site of what protesters derisively call ‘Cop City.’ I was out of state that day to bury my last living uncle. He was a Black man, a military vet too. More to the point here: for four decades, he was a police officer.”
- For similar context, it should be recalled that the former head of the Atlanta City Council, Natalyn Archibong, is directly responsible for encouraging similar activists to “occupy” a burned-out Wendy’s restaurant where seven-year old Secoria Turner was randomly murdered by terrorists to whom Archibong ceded the public road. Secoria’s mother made a wrong turn in front of the “occupied” former Wendy’s parking lot, and for that “crime,” her daughter was killed by heavily armed men who had taken over that part of the city. Archibong is not only being sued for her siding with armed “insurrectionists” in this occupation, which arose after the police returned fire at Rayshard Brooks, killing him, but the long-time Atlanta City Councilwoman was ousted in her most recent race by newcomer Doug Shipman. Unfortunately, Shipman is also a dolt opponent of the Police/EMT/Fireman training center.
One more note on AJC editorialist Andre Jackson’s moving editorial. Jackson speaks of visiting his sister at his policeman-uncle’s funeral. He writes: “[My] sister … still lives in the neighborhood where I grew up. The burglar bars and stout locks on her doors testify to the violence that’s traversed generations in my hometown … My sister marveled at those people in places high and low who oppose the concept and practice of policing. That idea certainly has not made neighborhoods like hers any safer.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editorial Editor Andre Jackson
Thank you, Mr. Jackson