the real reason why I left the 11th Hour

It's exactly as I said in the paper: needed more time with my family and wanted to try something new. When Mike Donila agreed to come aboard, I figured it was a good time, just because I knew they'd have a great guy with tremendous talent.

What I'm doing next?

Don't know exactly. I'll report back when I do. In the meantime, I plan to get my soapbox fix here, just like it was before I got in with the paper, regardless of whether or not anyone is reading. It'll give me something to do until I get busy again.

Sitting at Jittery Joes, I picked up the Telegraph and a familiar feeling swept over me: anger and hopelessness. (That's a wee bit of an exaggeration.) The lead story is a good one about the service delivery strategy, which I firmly believe is an issue with greater importance than most folks would suspect, though the headline itself is stupid. Next to it, a national story--like just about any you can find on Yahoo or Google--about Obama's reversal on stem cell research.

Below the fold, which is a weird no man's land since it is the front page but on the half most folks ignore when they're weighing whether or not to buy it, a story about how the Macon Police Department and Bibb County Sheriff's worked together with several other agencies to crack a meth trafficking ring. THAT IS FUCKING HUGE!

But because it's the (nee' Macon) Telegraph, it goes below the fold. That way, people can keep bitching about how the police don't do anything, going on about how bad crime is here and all that. It goes below the fold, beneath a national story that--while important--has less impact on our daily, local lives.

If the next biggest local story was about the birth of 39 puppies, instead of 39 arrests made in conjunction with the drug ring bust, I could see it below the fold.

Bah.

I said it was familiar, and I mean more like de ja vous. Before I started writing for the 11th Hour, I was upset by an issue of The Telegraph that put a headline about Wesleyan's endowment above a story about the way in which poor folks were gonna get screwed by state tort reform.

But, Chris, one is very local, and the other is a statewide issue. Yeah, but in this case, the tort reform law sort of flew in without much notice--or at least much ruckus from poor folks who would no longer be able to sue doctors beyond a preset limit, etc--and it seems like that would be the story you want to roll with. Wesleyan, which is a fine institution and all that, only has a few hundred students. There are THOUSANDS of broke people in Macon.

Do you see where I'm going?

Well, you will. Because I'm gonna bitch and moan for a while. (Just not all of it today.)

the Plight of the Running White Devil

The Plight of the Running White Devil

(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Obama)

Not even five full minutes after NBC projected Obama as the winner of the presidential election, a fire truck's siren screamed down an adjacent parallel street. Before McCain could hush his booing crowd for the umpteenth time, we were out the door and headed for safety, our emergency supplies packed days earlier. Though I won't tell you which abandoned building's bomb shelter basement we've chosen tonight, I can tell you that we've got enough food and water to last for weeks. We won't be here that long; I've already contacted allies in 'the network'. We'll soon be headed to more friendly borders… some place overwhelmingly blue.

It's hard to believe more people weren't prepared for this. Yes, there was a lot of talk, especially in private circles, about what kind of rioting black people would do—in celebration or destructive defeat—but where was the conversation about stodgy, old whites running amok, tearing at their cities like mourners shredding their threads? Yes, there were people like Zach Johnson, the Cecil Staton senate staffer who urged the Macon city government to beef up security in case of potential of black unrest, recalling the damage done to downtown after Jack Ellis was elected (for the record, Zach, nine years ago, those buildings just looked like that; no celebratory damage needed). But who would be the voice of the young, hip, liberal whites, warning us about what our parents might do when the inevitable befell McCain?

Across the country, particularly in these so-called Red States, some of us were ready, having first joked about the libelous emails forwarded by conservative loved ones. Now, I feel a little like Noah in the ark, thinking maybe I should have told more people.

The city is burning now and the scent of the air wafting in under the smoldering remains is a nauseating combination of Seagram's Extra Dry Gin, aerosol ironing starch, and Preparation-H. It seems Shirley Hills was the first to go nuts, considering its proximity to downtown's growing young leftist population and the black neighborhoods of East Macon. It won't be long until we see SUVs and station wagons plastered with private school stickers rolling in from Zebulon and Bass Road to Pleasant Hill and Bloomfield. The handful of carpet-bagging transplants who unwittingly settled in the lush environs of Ridge Avenue or Rivoli Woods will likely try to blend in with their retired Republican neighbors by casting off their Obama/Biden shirts and signs, setting fire to piles of books by Al Franken, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. The carnage. The god-awful carnage.

Maybe I was wooed by the idea that these older Americans were mostly harmless, that they "knew better", that they would behave. Maybe I should've listened to the people who had rightly warned me that these were the same people who were crazy enough to believe that a man running for the American presidency could actually be working for terrorists and that only the guy who sent them the email knew about it. Maybe I should've noticed that these were the people who not only recognize their own mortality every time they sneak a glance in the mirror but who now welcome death with open arms, ready to meet their maker with nothing left to lose.

Sitting here among the scurrying rats, the moldly and sulfuric vapors of a backed-up sewage line, the damp and dark—here, I realize my mistake. It was a little thing called hope. Not necessarily the hope born from our president-elect, but hope that the people I occupy this country with actually have its best interest at heart too.