The Colors of Advent

Yesterday was the third Sunday of Advent.  There were red candles on the windowsills  surrounded by greenery, and wreaths with red and gold ribbons streaming down hung high above them in the tall windows on either side of the sanctuary.  A Christmas tree at the front of the sanctuary was topped with an illuminated angel.  In spite of the rain the pews were nearly full, with families with their children home from college, the winter family vacations not yet started.

Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas.  I grew up in a church that saw Christmas as a secular holiday that had no place in church (we should celebrate Christ's birth every Sunday, not just in late December).  I love the rituals of the liturgical calendar.  It's not that they bring back childhood memories but they connect us to ebb and flow of seasons and harvests and lives ordered by movements of the sun and moon, rather than Outlook calendars.

But yesterday wasn't about joyous preparation.  It was about the unspeakable tragedy that occurred  on Friday.  I was at clinic when it happened, with charts appearing in my box faster than I could complete a patient visit.  That morning I'd left my Blackberry on the dining room table and I had a doctor's appointment of my own in the early afternoon.  So it wasn't until later when I got to the office that I heard the full horror of what had unfolded that morning in Newtown, Connecticut.

Yesterday their names were listed in a black rectangle on the front page of the New York Times.  Twenty first graders, killed in their classrooms, and 6 adults from the school -- the principal, the school psychologist, and 4 teachers -- and the mother of the shooter, who had been his first victim, before he took her guns and her car and headed off to the elementary school.  There was selfless heroism at the school -- the principal and psychologist were killed when they tried to intervene, teachers tried to shield their young students from the gunman -- but they couldn't protect the children from a young man armed with a Bushmaster AR-15.

It's not that all mass murders are committed with guns -- they aren't -- or that they only occur in the United States -- they don't -- but they occur here more often than anywhere else and they almost always involve guns.  The ease with which guns designed to kill lots of people quickly -- like the gun the shooter used at the Newtown elementary school -- are obtained in the United States is  part of the problem, but gun regulation alone won't prevent these tragedies. We also need to do better with providing care for our mentally ill, and providing a safe place to grow up for all our children, including the odd ones who have few friends who get bullied or just ignored. By Friday night, the story the New York Times posted on line included the obligatory quotes from acquaintances of the killer. A high school classmate said “I never saw him with anyone. I can’t even think of one person that was associated with him.”

A sermon on the third Sunday of Advent about taking a stand, about being a part of a community that demands safety for our children.  Surrounded by the symbols of the season, thinking about guns, and mental illness, and wondering if this is the episode that is bad enough that we will demand action, that we will realize that we can't just demand, that we have to take action ourselves.  Otherwise, nothing changes.

There are no other people who are going to step up to the plate on this one.  There's only us.

An Empty Wall

Living Walls, a local nonprofit organization, hosted a wonderful street art event in Atlanta in August.  Artists painted amazing murals on empty walls in different parts of the city.  One of those murals, by the Argentinian artist Hyuro, caused controversy from the start.  It featured multiple images of a woman who -- initially nude -- grew fur that turned into a garment, then she stepped out of it and the wolf walked away.  It was a wonderful piece of art on a bleak corner across the street from the grounds of the Federal penitentiary.  While some in the neighborhood loved it, others didn't.  The mural was vandalized a couple of times, and when the issue went to the neighborhood association, the Chosewood Park neighborhood voted to have it removed.  So volunteers from Living Walls came and painted it over and now it's gone.  I haven't been back since that Sunday afternoon in late August when Sarah and I went to see it.  It was wonderful, and I am glad I got to see it.  But now it's gone.

And now it's happened again.  This time it was a French artist named Pierre Roti, who started the work soon after the Living Walls event.  The mural is on a long wall on University Avenue in south Atlanta in the Pittsburgh neighborhood, just off the interstate.  The wall is adjacent to Carey Limosine and is more than 200 feet long.  Roti paints with spray paint, and weeks of work went into creating this piece.  But some in the neighborhood found the imagery (including snakes) disturbing, and others felt it was disrespectful, that the neighborhood was not engaged consulted before the work was created.  In November, a group including a retired state legislator took it upon themselves to paint over the work.  The murals' supporters showed up and worked to remove the paint before it dried, and a crew from the Georgia Department of Transportation -- the actual owner of the wall -- helped clean it up.

But then there were issues about who approved what and although Living Walls did do what the city told them to do, in terms of permitting for this site, the wall actually did belong to GDOT and they hadn't approved it.  So there was an announcement that the work would be painted as early as this week.

Caroline and I went to see it on Sunday afternoon.  By that time, it not only had been defaced by the neighborhood group in early November but someone had glued posters over it.  But it still could mostly be seen.  It's huge and hallucinatory and I can't even describe it.  My French is not good enough to read the inscription which seems to include the word "xenophobia."  (To get a better photo of the inscription I would have had to step out into the street, which is something that didn't seem worth the risk.)

 

But now it's gone.  Yesterday the GDOT painted over it and now it's back to being a long gray wall, waiting for the next vandal with a can of spray paint or a pile of posters.  Maybe the community can agree on a new piece of art to replace this one, and get the appropriate permits from GDOT to place it there.  But given the dispute over this one, it's hard to see any kind of community consensus emerging.  There were plenty of people in the Pittsburgh neighborhood who liked this one.  Whose decision is it?  There always will be people who don't like a particular work of art.  Do they get to veto a work that it is in a public place?

This year Living Walls tried to place murals in some neighborhoods that had been hard-hit by the recession.  They were trying to help revitalize communities by installations of murals.  Now there's talk about the need for more involvement of the community, which sounds good, but it's hard for me to see exactly how that's supposed to work.  Twice burned, if I were Living Walls I'd stay in the neighborhoods where I was welcome.  And the community leaders who have driven the decisions to remove the murals may not own the walls but they are now responsible for what follows.  What happens now?

We'll see.

Update from the Construction Zones

I was out of town last week and wasn't able to attend the meeting Tuesday morning at Morningside Elementary School on the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) construction. Given the absence of news on the neighborhood email lists subsequently about what was discussed there, I don't know how many people were able to attend. In the meantime, East Morningside is still torn up with and the right turn bypass lane to North Morningside is closed. It doesn't seem that there has been much progress made on construction there. Perhaps the absence of news and the absence of progress means there's been no decision made. If they are still trying to figure out how to get drivers to slow down, I can understand the lack of progress.

In the meantime, I came across this blog post from the Atlanta Public Schools from last month, listing the goals of the SRTS project in Morningside. I had to laugh when I saw the first one was "Reducing traffic congestion around the school by 10% every year."

Although the work at the East Morningside/Rock Springs/North Pelham intersection seems to have come to an indefinite halt, the work seems close to done at the North Morningside/North Highland intersection. There still is an orange barrel indicating the obliterated right turn late from North Morningside to North Highland southbound; some better markings, with reflective paint on the new concrete that now blocks the lane, would help. The crosswalks are now marked and aligned with the new islands in the intersection.





At Cumberland and North Morningside, where the whole things started, the big pile of sand has been replaced with a larger pile of dirt, suggesting that they are filling in the new space that they created there. The small traffic island that used to be there is long gone. Instead there's a much larger area that is connected to the block between Sherwood and North Morningside on the northwest corner of the intersection. That work seems to be going slowly, too, allowing ample time for speculation. What are they going to put there, after all the dirt goes in? We've often discussed this, when we walk by on our regular walks with the dog. I've suggested that it might be a good location for the new sixth grade annex but I don't know that that idea has gotten any traction yet.



Of course, if they did that, they probably wouldn't meet that goal for a 10% reduction in traffic.