SLATE article: What Does Racism Have to Do With Gridlock?
I just read this on slate.com and, seeing that I live in the Atlanta area and survived the recent winter storm fiasco, found this article very interesting. (I assume the same rule applies in GD as in LBN about only excerpting 4 paragraphs, I highly recommend a complete read of the article). The gist of the article is that since the affluent white suburbs are afraid of black people (in addition to a dislike of government and taxes) decent public transportation hasn't happened. Anyone who could ride MARTA rail home on Tuesday had a pretty easy time of it, the rest of us were in a huge mess.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/01/atlanta_s_snow_fiasco_the_real_problem_in_the_south_isn_t_weather_it_s_history.html
This week’s weather fiasco in Atlanta, which stranded thousands of commuters on glassy-slick roads and gridlocked the entire metro region for the better part of 24 hours, was caused by a freak snowstorm, they say. And this is true, in the same way it’s true to say the Civil War started because some guys in Charleston, S.C., started lobbing cannon balls at Fort Sumter. But the real problem in Atlanta isn’t snow; the real problem is history.
I grew up in Atlanta and still have scores of friends, former colleagues, and family members in Georgia, so my Facebook feed lit up with snow news long before the first flakes hit. (Southerners greet the prospect of snow with the excitement they usually reserve for rumors of the Second Coming of Jesus. More, actually, since the Second Coming does not entail a frantic race to the store to get milk and toilet paper.) A friend whose office overlooks 10th Street in Midtown posted a picture of the snarled traffic as it was happening, and I knew this was going to be bad, bad, bad. I also knew that I’d be hearing stories about folks coming out to aid stranded motorists, or inviting strangers in for a bowl of hot oatmeal or some such, because Southerners are like that. A New Yorker might go out of his way to help a stranger cross the street in a time of disaster; a Southerner is apt to take him home and cook him dinner. And in fact there were plenty of such vignettes, all of them reminding me of what I miss about living there.
“Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal … such was the South at its best,” wrote W. J. Cash in his classic 1941 work, The Mind of the South. So far, so good—but Cash goes on to describe some less appealing but still quintessentially Southern traits, among them being “suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too-narrow sense of social responsibility.” And, of course, “too great an attachment to racial values”—or, so as not to mince words, racism.
“Exaggerated individualism” is a pretty good description of the Southern approach to politics—especially in Georgia, which has more counties than any state in the country except Texas. “Atlanta” is actually a 10-county metropolitan region which is home to more than 4 million people and 68 separate municipalities. In some places, such an amalgamation might make people think about consolidating services. Not in Atlanta: In Fulton County alone, home to most of the city proper, three suburban municipalities have formed their own governments just since 2005 in an effort to distance themselves from the urban problems of their big-city neighbor, and there’s a growing push among residents of the affluent northern end of the county to form a whole new county, as if Georgia doesn’t already have enough of those. Secession movements have percolated in various metropolitan areas across the country for years, and lately western Maryland and the entire state of Texas, among other places, have made a lot of noise about seceding from greater Maryland and the United States, respectively. But in the Deep South, people don’t just talk about secession; they do it. Southerners love them some local “gummit,” the local-er the better. But when regional disaster hits—whether it’s the years-long drought of a few years back, or this week’s snowstorm—that means umpteen local and state politicians have to work together on a deadline, putting aside their various ambitions and competing constituencies under adverse conditions in order to deal with a common threat.
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