Sprayberry Crossing Shopping Center

Is there change in the air about the way East Cobb community activism is being carried out these days? Some recent events have represented something of a departure.

Toward the end of a meeting this week about the Sprayberry Crossing Shopping Center, a young woman walked down an aisle at the Sprayberry High School theater holding up high a pink sign that said simply in black letters: “We Need Change.”

She panned the sign around the room, a packed house of around 500 citizens who attended to press for the removal of a decades-long eyesore in their community. Others brought their signs too, and raised them to applause.

This was no usual East Cobb citizens gathering, which often consists of a garden variety town-hall meeting, or a zoning matter that springs nearby homeowners into strenuous opposition.

The issue wasn’t about closing libraries or imposing fees to use senior services, actions which we know gets East Cobbers worked up into a passionate, often angry lather.

There was a different energy in the room at Sprayberry. Cobb commissioner JoAnn Birrell admitted the turnout surpassed her town-hall meetings. Joe Glancy, a resident who created a Facebook group and organized Wednesday’s citizens’ meeting around the Sprayberry Crossing issue, was encouraged by the general civility of his fellow citizens in their online forums.

Yet the feeling of restlessness and frustration was noticeable when elected officials and county staffers explained the limited measures available to force the property owner to clean up a run-down shopping center that’s become a haven for criminal activity.

When they admitted a new “blight tax” would yield a fine of only $17,000, the groans in the room were palpable. After more than 20 years of futile protests to force something to happen with a dilapidated retail center, many in the room sensed that their efforts were far from being resolved.

A meeting that was considered a good “first step” was still simmering with a desire for change. I was taken aback at seeing the “We Need Change” sign, something associated with zealous social and political protests. Something like this, just to get rid of an old shopping center? Really?

It’s the kind of sign you might see at a Tea Party rally, a Black Lives Matter protest, among Trump voters on a campaign stop, and teenagers responding to the latest school massacre.

When I saw the “We Need Change” sign, I immediately thought of the East Cobb high school students who organized walkouts a couple weeks ago to honor the shooting victims in Parkland, Fla., and to demand changes in gun laws.

Earlier on Wednesday, I had been in touch with some of them about their punishments for ignoring Cobb County School District opposition to their protests, on safety and school-day disruption grounds.

Most received one-day in-school suspensions, fairly light disciplinary action given the strong threats issued against the walkouts. None of them had lost their stridency in lashing out at school officials they accused of smothering their free-speech rights, and they were getting ready for Saturday’s March for Our Lives events in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

These are kids who take honors classes at Walton, Pope, Lassiter, Wheeler and other schools, are getting ready for college, and who are in every sense model students. While the district’s desire to keep students safe is understandable, I think a rare opportunity to teach a valuable civics lesson was lost.

Instead of recognizing a potentially striking moment in our nation’s history about school violence, district leaders threw the rule book at them. These students weren’t protesting bad cafeteria food, too much homework or the usual school gripes.

Whatever you think about their gun-control demands—which I’m skeptical of because the problem with these shootings is much deeper than firearms—these students deserved a better response to their concerns than suppression and silence.

Consider the young lives of these students. They weren’t yet born when Columbine happened. They were in grade school when Sandy Hook took place. Now, on the verge of young adulthood, and in the wake of the murders of 14 fellow students and three teachers at a suburban high school very much like their own, they’re told they better not interrupt classes or else.

My nephew, who’s also in high school in Florida, made the good point to me the other day when he wondered why those students demanding safety would walk out to a potentially vulnerable place on their campus, like a football stadium.

His school allowed the walkouts, but he chose to stay in class. Like his aunt, he’s not inclined to protest. The stridency of the national walkout forces has often been severe, tainted with ugly, partisan political rhetoric. I’ve found some of it quite startling.

There are those who accuse these young people, not old enough to vote, of being used by adults with an agenda. While I don’t agree with them on gun-control, to reduce this youthful idealism to such adult cynicism is one of the problems with our public discourse.

Instead of being encouraged for their willingness to get involved in public life, they’re patronized for expressing differing views on a divisive issue. What about the Walton students who organized a pre-school event on the walkout day, approved by school administrators, with no mention of gun-control? I would never suggest they’re also being used, although they are leaders of established student organizations.

As I head into middle age, I sense we’re on the cusp of tremendous generational change in our society. Too many people of my Baby Boom generation, and especially those holding political power, want to maintain the status quo. Or profess they can do nothing about rather mundane things, like plow over a decaying shopping center that citizens have been complaining about for decades.

What these young people will find out when they are old enough to vote, and get fully involved, is what many heard about Sprayberry Crossing the other night, from people they elect, and pay, to solve their problems: There’s only so much they can do.

We have seen teenage high school students and middle-age and older homeowners in East Cobb taking civic action into their own hands. They want change. While that can easily become a cliché, it’s not all that different from other political and social causes in recent years, left, right and otherwise.

They are borne out of frustration, anger, fear and a sense that the way things are now are not the way they should be, and that cannot be sustained. They are citizens galvanized to demand that those in power not just respond to their concerns, but actively advocate for them.

The outcome of their recent events may not have fully turned out the way they had in mind, but it was quite refreshing to see all this unfold in a community that isn’t accustomed to such displays of vocal dissent.

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