I use that analogy quite a bit, don’t I? Perhaps I’m drawn to scenarios in which they seem like insurmountable endeavors, to which makes it so easy for me to make the metaphor as often as I think I’m doing.
Regardless, Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chic-Fil-A has concerns about what’s going to happen when the new Falcons stadium opens in the near future, when the Goodyear blimp is shooting aerial coverage, and reveals to everyone watching that Atlanta is a pretty divided city:
“The horror that I think of is when the Goodyear blimp is flying over the new stadium with Atlanta’s beautiful skyline in the background,” Cathy said. “And then the blimp shows the area on the other side of the stadium and it looks like a scene out of Baghdad.”
I mean, he’s not entirely wrong. West of the new stadium, as well as the Georgia Dome, quite literally across the street from both venues, the city of Atlanta rapidly turns into a horrific ghetto where anyone watching the news hearing about anything drug, shooting or killing related, happens in. A comparison to Baghdad is a little extreme, but for the sake of emphasis, it’s effective at painting a picture of just how run down and shanty the West End kind of is, and served as inspiration to immediately imagine a skyline from the West End showing the shantytown from District 9, with the new Falcons stadium in the background.
However, let’s be real here. Nobody really cares about what can be seen from an aerial shot. An aerial shot doesn’t quite capture the desolate ghettos that surround Atlanta’s venues in the first place, since Cathy’s nightmare scenario literally pans out as it does now, since the Georgia Dome is right next to where the new stadium is being built, as well as Turner Field and its own surrounding Baghdad.
It’s pretty obvious that Cathy has wishes that the areas surrounding the new stadium would improve, so that some Chic Fil-As could be built in the West End, and the fact that the Chic-Fil-A Peach Bowl will also be played at the new venue, it would be nice if it weren’t surrounded by so much mirth. But frankly, sounding the metaphorical community alarm that the West End “needs help,” is going to accomplish about as much as every whistle-blower to states the obvious fact that the City of Atlanta desperately needs some transportation solutions to the daily suffocating highway traffic.
Frankly, I don’t really think that the West End, and the Baghdad-like ghettos can actually be fixed at all, no matter how many millionaire CEOs try and create awareness to how much they need help. Awareness is one thing, but action is a vastly more arduous task (read: costly), that no single entity wants to put forth the resources to actually attempt.
This map might be slightly exaggerated, but basically anything in the red is basically Baghdad.
That’s a whole lot of red to try and “fix.”
I’m also going to assume that “fixing” the West End entails repairing homes that the “owners” have personally allowed to become as run down and deteriorated as they currently are, and have a hope and prayer that they’ll maintain it after being “fixed.”
That’s a whole lot of properties to fix up, and a whole lot of people to hope will maintain afterward.
The bottom line is that I can’t imagine that there’s any possible way that the West End can actually be fixed. If anyone watches the video in the link above, Cathy goes on and on about how his dad engrained into him the belief that “there’s a solution to every problem.”
The solution to the Baghdad-like West End is pretty simple. Pretty guerilla, forceful, and pretty cold, but it would probably work; it worked in Washington D.C. to accelerate the ever-popular phrase, gentrification, and there’s no reason it wouldn’t work in the West End.
Evict everyone in the West End, tear everything down, and start from scratch. Baghdad is gone, stuffy white CEOs like Cathy are satiated, and the aesthetic view around the Falcons’ new stadium improves, even if the Falcons themselves continue to dwell in perpetual mediocrity. What happens to all the people that live in the West End? It’s not like anyone has cared about them prior to this kind of course of action, why would anyone care about them afterward?
Yes, all that sounds horrible and inhuman, but it’s also difficult to say that I’m entirely wrong here. Supposedly, so much of the lands of the West End are already owned by businesses and companies, why they don’t pull the triggers and force people off their land in the first place is completely beyond me.
There is a solution to every problem. Unfortunately, the solutions themselves don’t always smell like roses, and potentially have the capability to make a lot of lives miserable. But sometimes you have to lance a boil to get it to heal.
