I often find myself sitting at this keyboard offering my rebuttal to this or that article and this morning feels like no exception to that rule. When I do so, I never want to feel that I am just coming off as a knee-jerk reaction to what someone else is saying. This particular one is interesting because the article being rebutted hits really close to home and is also a mirror image of an argument I am trying to make. 

On Friday, The New Yorker posted an article by Dan Piepenbring that bemoans the opening of several Chick-fil-A restaurants in New York City  as "a creepy infiltration." Common ground, right out of the gate. I totally get what he is saying as I'm a metaphorical protester in the streets throwing rocks against the juggernaut determined to use my tax dollars to secure the creepy infiltration of Georgia by Amazon. I get it. But then lets dig a little deeper to see what he finds so creepy about this infiltration. 

There's a concern that the Atlanta-area office of the company having a statue of Jesus washing His disciples' feet. Outside of the crucifixion, the greatest instance of humility, service, leadership, and love in the history of the world permanently on display for these corporate leaders is one of the main problems he cites. There is the ever present and consistently vague "anti-L.G.B.T." label that gets slapped on anything that is not overt and vocal in its support of anything the Left christens...er...secularens as being "a part of this century" or "on the right side of history." There is the use of the word "community" supposedly being used as propaganda, unlike how The New Yorker and others speak of "the LGBT Community," the "immigrant community,"

​Mr. Piepenbring's "anti-L.G.B.T." accusation is in regard to the charitable wing of the company. It is an accusation that brings vague and harsh judgement on Chick-fil-A's efforts to support families and young people. Had Mr. Piepenbring dug a little deeper into the WinShape program he could have done a piece on an effort that houses foster children in a safe and stable environments, gives away annual $4000 scholarships to students participating in the program, offers counseling services to couples wishing to save their marriages, you know, really creepy, evil, dark, and, apparently, "fried"  "anti-L.G.B.T." stuff. They're really just terrible people who have no business selling fast food in Manhattan. ​ 

Mr. Piepenbring also shares some concern about the blatant marketing and advertising. Has he seen Times Square? Does he know what all goes on on Madison Avenue? It seems that perhaps he is troubled that Truett Cathy, a veteran of WWII and a man I met in a cafeteria-style line at his summer camp where he was having breakfast with the kids, "died a billionaire" after just doing the same thing the more successful half of New York City is doing. The biggest difference is, Truett stopped to help a lot of folks along the way. I guess the problem could be that he decided to help the ones Mr. Piepenbring isn't very tolerant of. 

I don't spend a lot of time defending big business here. They don't need my help. I'd much rather defend family owned businesses. But if you've been in a Chick-fil-A, you know why they're successful. Rather than pointing out why and emulating it, it is so much easier to try to assassinate the character of a business that does more with six days than most do in seven.

I don't know if Mr. Piepenbring will ever read these. I doubt he will. But if he does, I'll offer him the same invitation I've offered others I've rebutted. Come to Georgia. See for yourself. Get off the interstate, out of the big cities, come to see and understand. I'll be glad to show you myself. 

Sam Burnham, Curator
@C_SamBurnham

i want to describe a community. This is an actual community, not some group of same people with a similar characteristic they identify with. This is the real definition of the term - a real physical place. Think of the characteristics I mention.

​The majority of the people in this community live in poverty. There is a substantial percentage of the population who struggle with drugs and overdoses are common. By the time emergency services arrive to ass=ist with this or any other medical problem, it is often too late. Even if public safety personnel are close by and able to arrive in a timely manner, there is often no good medical help available and when there is, the residents can't afford the bills. Children grow up and have little to hope for. The economy in this community doesn't produce any jobs to speak of so a decent paying job means a long inconvenient commute. The best hope for the kids would be to get a good education and then get out. The problem with that is the schools are underfunded and have trouble attracting good teachers. What teachers they do attract are strapped for resources and technology is virtually non-existent. To top it off, there is not much access to healthy food and when there is, the residents can't afford it.  The kids are set up for disaster before they even get started and that continues the same vicious cycle for yet another generation. There is just no hope for the people who live there.  

Now, answer me this. Am I describing a small ghost town in South Georgia or a neighborhood on Atlanta's West Side? Are the majority of these residents white or black? From the description I've given here, there is no way to know. I have not given enough information to make an educated guess. 

The description is just a few of the similarities that have come to mind as I've been considering the differences in  urban and rural life. It turns out that people in the impoverished areas of the inner city and  rural towns have a lot more in common than either is able to understand. That is largely because the only real difference between these two areas is the skin color of the inhabitants. And if you are dealing with rural areas in the Black Belt region, you may not even have that distinction. 

We've seen these two groups manipulated by the politically powerful. On one side you have a group convincing the rural people that the inner city people are getting all these government handouts while doing nothing to help themselves out of their situation. The inner city folks are being drawn into the persistent myth of "White Privilege" and as sitting on Easy Street because of their skin color. All along, neither group is doing any better than the other is. Neither group has any realistic hope of changing their situation. And the politically and economically powerful from both of these races really couldn't care any less about either group...except at election time. 

At present, I'm not entirely sure what to do with this epiphany. I mostly thought it was worth pointing out. Somehow these tow types of communities have to realize how much common ground they stand on together. There is enough common ground to build some cooperation on.  The trick is where to start. 

Sam Burnham, Curator
@C_SamBurnham

I had a tweet go viral this week. It somehow got picked up by someone and was included in a Twitter Moment along with tweets by some much more well known and more widely published writers than myself. The tweet was bemoaning the fact that there has been a train filled with 10 million pounds of processed sewage stranded in the town of Parrish Alabama for the last two months. Sure, I tried to make it comical and for the most part that worked. But this is also just one example of a growing issue. 

Technically the train is filled with "biowaste" which appears to be a catchall label for any organic waste material that will decompose. This particular batch of "biowaste" is from processed sewage in New York and New Jersey. It could be a mixture of feces, food waste, vomit, toilet paper, used tampons, used condoms, any organic material that was flushed down a toilet or ground in a garbage disposal in the New York City area. Now it is sitting in a rail yard in the Alabama sunshine, waiting for summer. 

The material technically belongs to a company called Big Sky Environmental, a name that could have you thinking they preserve the snow capped peaks of Montana. In reality, they run a landfill and buy literal feces from the Yankees and dump it in Alabama. The train is supposed to be headed for The Big Sky Environmental landfill near Adamsville. While en route, it was to be stored in a rail yard in West Jefferson but the residents there passed an ordinance against storing such material in their town. Since Parish has no such ordinance, Big Sky has decided to store the train there.

At 50,000 tons, the train's contents constitute two full days of the landfill's rated daily intake as published on the company's website. As they have many other customers, including municipalities, they'll have to fit the trainload in as demand dictates availability. 

Now, a modern fix for this problem is for Parrish to pass an ordinance of their own to force the train out and never allow it to return. But my question is why that is necessary. Why must people who have chosen a more rural life be forced to put up with this nuisance because 20.3 million people decided to cram themselves as close as they could get to the confluence of the East and Hudson Rivers? Why do we, as a society, allow a megalopolis simply pile all their crap onto a train and dump it on people who have suitable methods of dealing with their own crap? It brings back a question my high school biology teacher posed to us when we talked about throwing stuff away - "Where is away?" 

As more people continue to cram themselves into American cities, this is just one issue that has to be dealt with. It is not fair to saddle rural America with this burden. And while I prefer a free market, such a market depends on us making decisions and having a collective conscience. Big Sky is in this for money. That is not evil in and of itself. In fact, that is why people go into business. They are providing a few jobs in the Adamsville and therefore are having an economic impact on the area. But is the (likely small) amount of money coming into the economy worth the hassle that is being caused in the area? Once the landfill is full and no longer usable, what will Big Sky do in regards to the local economy? Why isn't a modern and forward thinking place like New York City not coming up with modern and forward thinking ways to deal with their own waste? Biomass energy generation comes to mind, especially for a place that won't ever turn the lights off at night. 

If nothing else, this should serve as a metaphor for the exploitation that rural areas are having to endure from urban areas. Major policies - gun control, economics, education, energy, etc, are based on urban and suburban experiences and then forced on rural areas and small towns. Refuse of every kind - garbage, biowaste, coal ash - is gathered in the cities and disposed of in rural landfills. The elites preach about sustainability and other "green" policies and even attack the emissions of livestock, especially cattle, but still fill their streets with cars and bury potential biomass energy sources in acres of potential farmland - farmland that could be producing sustainable food for Birmingham and the surrounding area. Could be. If it wasn't filling up with New York City's feces. 

But there is no policy, no government action, no law that can solve this. If Parrish were to pass an ordinance, Big Sky would just relocate this rancid mass to some other unsuspecting location. This is an issue for this conscience of this nation. The only way this can be truly solved is for companies like Big Sky to realize that their bottom line is not more important than their neighbors, for cities like New York to put action and intellectual forthrightness into their sustainable rhetoric. 

​Until that happens, Big Sky needs to come get their train.