Every once and a while I make the mistake of reading some inane posts about why people hate Atlanta (ex.
this douche,
these fuckers, and
these douche fuckers). I was reading
this bad boy, and as a native Atlantan unforseeably imbued with hometown pride, I decided to respond.
1)
"Traffic sucks in this place!"
Admit it, you live in the burbs. If you lived in the city this would not be your biggest complaint.
When people complain about "traffic" they mean expressway traffic. When they say Atlanta, they mean 50 miles in every direction. Gwinnett is not Atlanta. Alpharetta is not Atlanta. Duluth, Marietta, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Smyrna, Norcross, Snellville are not Atlanta. To every person who complains about the traffic and lives in any of these areas, congratulations. All of you are the creators of the problem complaining about the problem.
If you are so incensed about gridlock, start speaking up and advocating commuter rails. Or move intown and figure out other ways to get around.
2)
"There are too many 'Peachtrees'..."
You're an idiot.
3)
"Wasn't that a restaurant last month...?"
You're complaining about business turnover? Like you randomly passed some furniture store in
Cobb County and now it's a Denny's? Big fucking deal guy!
Do you actually care about these places?
Support local businesses! Try your best to get to know someone who works at a store or restaurant you like or at least become enough of a part of the community to know why a business closed.
4)
"No one here is even from Atlanta..."
I have no idea why this came up in a search for "atlantans".
That's just not true. If we are to use the broad definition of Atlanta to include the suburbs, most of the population is local. And even if that were not the case, what city in the U.S. is completely local?
Where? Bangor, Maine? Sweet! Of course I won't move there since I'm NOT FROM BANGOR.
5)
"Everything is too spread out."
This is true. However, if you eliminate the 'burbs then we're merely discussing the limits of MARTA.
First of all, MARTA sucks. Second of all I've never seen any of you on it.
It's very easy to say that "MARTA goes nowhere" when you don't try to use it. All the complaints I hear about our public transit come from people who do not even try to use the system. I've been asking people for the last couple of months about how the lines changed names and how service has been ridiculously scaled back, and all I've gotten is blank stares. Because we don't use it (and by we I mean the entire middle class) we don't know specifically what's wrong with it. MARTA is a neglected puppy. If we ignore it, it will probably die. If we nurture it, we can teach it tricks.
There's plenty wrong with this city not only with some basic aspects of its infrastructure, but also things like our cultural apathy, our love of retail and restaurant chains (Eat Fresh!), and the massive racial divide. But the kinds of complaints I referred to earlier come from a very specific populous and I just can't stand this suburban attitude about the whole thing.
All of us who live in the city need to know why we do, embrace and extol the virtues of why we do, and work against, not complain about, the things we do not love.
- Jimmy James, Native Son
I never think of NYC as being bleak except when it's dark, or when it's shot in black and white. Gotta love 90's era hip hop for exploiting this. 99 Problems eat your heart out!
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