"Chemtrails" by Beck
The city of Atlanta sometimes seems like a bit of an underdog. General Sherman and his troops burned it to the ground in 1864. A century later, the passage of the Civil Rights Act would prompt a furious "white flight," resulting in a neglected downtown and the fastest-ballooning suburbs in the country. We are sometimes ridiculed for lacking the culture and identity a modern city should possess. The Braves, Falcons and Hawks are notorious for making the playoffs but not quite clenching the championship. Our transportation is the poster-child for poor planning and unsustainable infrastructure.
But we have been a juggernaut of business and commerce for decades. While violence in other Southern cities made headlines during the Civil Rights Movement, President Kennedy praised Atlanta for the example it set in how to integrate peacefully, and Martin Luther King Jr. headquartered his Southern Christian Leadership Conference here. We are the only Southern city to host the Olympic Games. We are the undisputed capital of the South.
I am what many of us who live in the city call "ITP" or "Inside the Perimeter," in reference to the interstate highway that circles Atlanta. We can be somewhat snobby about what is "ITP" and what is "OTP" and it doesn't really matter, but I think that some of us sense that there is a decades-old disdain for the city of Atlanta proper. I think we insist on designating ourselves as "ITP" because we want to embrace this city in a way that didn't always happen a few decades ago. We're now experiencing cultural activity that you can't find anywhere else in the South. More and more people are deciding to live and work in Atlanta, rather than living outside of it and spending hours each day commuting in. Any city has its dangers and its inconveniences, but the unusual mixture of people that mingle and collaborate here creates a magic that we insist you will be hard-pressed to find "OTP." I think all of us see the good happening, and know that if we continue to embrace Atlanta, we will eventually see improvement in transportation, infrastructure, crime, and city government.
I made this time lapse video because I love Atlanta.
