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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I understand the frustration of people living near that shopping center, but at the same time it distresses me that so many people are eager to use political power to control property that does not belong to them. You do not want to live in that world.
Several years ago it was rather unsettling to see a crowd of residents in the Walton zone chase away a proposed neighborhood of homes in the 300s. They were finally happy once the price was jacked up to near the 700k mark.
This is not what politics and government are for. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with insane housing prices like they have in California. Our kids will not be able to afford to live here when they grow up.
I also find it creepy that people are terrifying kids in school with exaggerated stories of violence. I have school aged kids. I don’t appreciate that I have to explain that these overblown fears are unreasonable.
School shootings and overall school violence are down, but you’d never know that if you watched the news or listened to the exasperated activists. Schools claim to teach critical thinking. If so then I have to assume that these student protesters have not taken that class yet!
Life doesn’t always hand you trophies. You can be an adult, work to solve your own problems, and improve yourself. Otherwise, I guess you can engage in acts of impotence by prancing around in front of politicians with your little protest signs to try to meddle with the lives and property of others.
Bravo to you, Wendy, and congratulations on your ability to synthesize these seemingly-unrelated local events into an editorial that discerningly lays out the larger principles and issues at stake.
I am an East Cobb parent of 2 teenagers, whom I educate at home, for many reasons, one of them precisely summarized by the short-sighted, obtuse attitudes of so many public school administrators towards this national walk out event, which you laid out so well.
One of my essential guiding principles in educating them has always been a quote by an 18th-century British educator, by the name of Charlotte Mason: “The question is not, – how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education – but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”
Institutional administrators can talk until they’re blue in the face about whatever the current “educational buzzword/philosophy du jour” may be- lifelong learning, critical thinking, etc….they all come down to the essential, eternal question of, “how do we raise engaged, principled citizens who give a damn? Who will expend the rest of their lives learning and engaging, to make the world a better place, not just for themselves and their own families, but for those around them who can’t?”
Yet when push comes to shove, and the moment of choice is at hand, these public school bureaucrats will always fall back on what is easiest (for them), rather than what is right by their students….”yeah, yeah sure, we want you to care, but what we really want most, is for you to follow the rules, and not give us any trouble!”
Well, MY students DO care, and WILL care, and WILL be leaders who make a difference in this messed-up world….apparently, along with that small fraction of awesome, Cobb County public high schoolers who were brave enough to say, “Oh, it’s In-School Suspension you’re gonna put on my record?! You know what? I’ll take it…make my day.”
Well-done, kids…..well-done.
As a parent of a child who walked out, I can tell you what was in their mind when they walked on that football field knowing they were potentially dangering their lives and most certainly facing punishment from the leaders who should care more about school safety than 17 minutes of peaceful protest. These kids were thinking of 17 lives recently lost and far more lives lost over the years they have attended school. They were thinking of years lost where meaningful changes could have been made, laws passed, solutions explored and implemented. They were thinking that this inaction has cost too many young lives and traumatized more. These are children who have lived facing a fear every day none of us should have to and they have had enough. I feared for my child on that football field. I watched the videos on the news praying nothing would happen. But that morning despite her fear, my daughter told me that it takes courage and sacrifice to fight for change, like the civil rights activists, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and like the Parkland survivors. She was going to be part of that fight, regardless of the risk and punishment. I am proud of our courageous kids in East Cobb who faced down opposition and oppression to fight for the right of children to go to school without fear or threat of being slaughtered. It is unfortunate that our school district took an oppressive, draconian position against these young people, however they plan to take their punishment with the same dignity they took when they stood in peaceful protest for 17 minutes, in honor of 17 and so many more lives lost.