THE STREETCAR NAMED DISASTER

Look!  I am perfectly happy for Atlanta’s leadership to satisfy the intellectual needs of the Downtown elite by building stadiums, THE STREETCAR NAMED DISASTER, a Billy Payne $25 dollar a ride Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round or two.  But do it after and ONLY after you have repaired your despicable streets.  Where is Pothole Posse Shirley Franklin when we need her?

 

Have you driven in downtown Atlanta in the last six months?  Have you made three detours during a two mile drive while tracks are being laid for THE STREETCAR NAMED DISASTER?  What mind dreamed up this abortion?  How much does it cost?  Who is paying?  Have you driven to Decatur via DeKalb Avenue dodging potholes and cavities and cracks that jar your teeth and destroy your alignment?  There’s a personhole cover in the 600 block of Dekalb Avenue in the westbound lane that is at least three inches deep and three years old.  (I use “personhole cover” rather than “manhole cover” because I strive to be politically correct.)   My car is thirteen years old, and every time I fail to dodge that canyon, off I go to my alignment man who tells me that the City of Atlanta sends him business every day.

 

Do these downtown geniuses drive in Atlanta?  Surely they don’t stay in downtown after dark! Does Captain Herb helicopter them in and out?  Does the Mayor’s limo not feel the bumps that the rest of us have to endure?  Do our crack City Council members drive to work?  Are they so bottom dead that they don’t feel the jolts that their slaves feel?   Do they feel anything?  Do they know and not care, or is it the same old, status quo, couldn’t care less.

 

How dare they build THE STREETCAR NAMED DISASTER before they repair their deteriorated streets?  I can remember, just barely, when city governments operated solely for the comfort of the people that they serve.  When did that change to operating solely for their own ease and comfort?

 

Last night the Peachtree-Pine Community in midtown Atlanta accommodated 27 women and 34 children, ages ranging from 14 to 1.  They slept there after eating a feastl DONATED by the saints at Manuels Tavern.  These homeless people were there for several reasons.  The multimillion dollar city shelter called Gateway in mid-June stopped sheltering single woman.  In July it stopped taking women with children.  We don’t know exactly what THE GATEWAY is a gateway to.  Perhaps its terminal is the same as THE STREETCAR NAMED DISASTER  These human beings had no place to be.  Word on the street is The Gateway is gearing up to receive the 500 or so men at The Pine whenever The Conspirators successfully steal the Peachtree-Pine building.

Fifty-one people last night were sacrificed politically by TEAM GOLIATH in order to complete the demise of The Pine and  little Team David.  TEAM GOLIATH consists of the City of Atlanta, The Chamber, Central Atlanta Progress, (ADID) Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, Manny Fialkow’s hazy conglomerate, Atlanta United Way, Emory University, Emory Health Care Services, Inc. and men of God along the “sanitized corridor” like Rector Hoare, CEO of Varsity Grill Episcopal Church.  And all these conspirators are self- proclaimed experts on homelessness.  Horace Sibley and Debi Starnes announced years ago that they would end homelessness in Atlanta in 5 years.  Sorry, 10 years.  Oops, as the late Jim Lee Scott writes, are we now saying 15 years?

TEAM GOLIATH’s attitude toward those woman and babies that slept in chairs last night brings to mind a story Tom Are told me last week.  Both of us admire William Sloan Coffin, former student pastor at Yale.  Coffin is an expert on many issues including world hunger.  Some time ago he was invited to speak on that subject at a downtown, fancy-ass Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.  Pastor Coffin stepped to the pulpit and said the following: I paraphrase Tom Are.  Coffin said that one half of the world’s population went to bed hungry last night, and you in this congregation don’t give a SHIT.  Presbyterian gasps resounded aplenty.  And you are far more concerned that I would use the word SHIT than you are that one half of the world’s population went to bed hungry.  Coffin took his seat.

 

TEAM GOLIATH knows that women and children every night in DOWNTOWN Atlanta have nothing and have nowhere to go.  I shout it. I’d shout it if I could from the roof tops.  I’d shout it from atop corrupt City Hall.  I’d shout it from the roof top of the Hurt Building.  I’d shout it from the roof of Atlanta United Way,  I’d shout it from All Saints’ Episcopal Church’s rooftop, “TEAM GOLIATH is starving homeless women and their children in Atlanta, and it doesn’t give a SHIT.” A difference between TEAM GOLIATH and the Philadelphia Presbyterians is TEAM GOLIATH doesn’t give a SHIT that I use the word SHIT or any word that I might utter.  In a word TEAM GOLIATH doesn’t give a SHIT.

 

James Wilson Beaty

Jeremiah 22:16

August 22, 2013