The Worst MLK Day
“The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.” - Senator J.W. Fulbright
The historic Ebenezer Baptist Church stands a block from where Taylor was killed by an away Atlanta DPW bulldozer (Photo: JJonahJackalope, CC)
Cornelius “Psycho” Taylor was a good man. He liked to draw, was caring to those he knew, and was planning for the future. Friend and neighborhood outreach worker Sylvia Broome says, “he had dreams, ambitions, he had family, he was a good, good friend of mine and he's gone.”
“An upstanding, outstanding person,” Nolan English elaborated, Cornelius was “always helpful, always joking, always lively, always poured into people, you know? If you walked around with your head down, he was the one to lift you up."
What he could call his own was meager, but included a small tent he had setup alongside peers in Atlanta’s Old Wheat Street Encampment. His small home in Old Fourth Ward was nothing less than exactly that, holding daily nothings and small comforts alongside the most important things he had managed to keep, despite all else, for ten long years on the streets. Alongside a toothbrush, perhaps his birth certificate; fork, knife, and plate accompanying his the sketchbook and pencils; daily schedule stowed alongside the camp-fuel he hoped would keep him warm through the increasing cold. I can only speculate, and unfortunately we will never know.
At about noon on Thursday the 16th, Cornelius was crushed by an Atlanta Department of Public Works (DPW) bulldozer. A man, every possession he had painstakingly protected as all else was stripped from him, swept away by the city in preparation of Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day celebrations in the neighborhoods surrounding the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church.
There is a tragic poetry to this exact moment in our national story, a series of interconnected events which inevitably lead to an ending for almost all like that imposed upon Cornelius as he peacefully occupied the small place he could call his own. It almost seems no coincidence, a man made low by the pressures of Capitalism consumed by the State in preparation of celebrating a man who died in his fight to protect the weak and enfeebled nearby.
We live in a time of near-universal unrest. On every front, the US is failing under the weight of debt, sickness, wage theft, and inaccessibility. The wealth of our predecessors has run dry, the excesses of our modern world demanding the consumer spend in equal measure to sustain itself; a society fundamentally dependent on overindulgence. Those who fall behind must, of course, be consumed themselves.
The most basic of needs and services, things which were once offered by reputable and regulated vendors, are now attained through third parties in privatized markets. We are surrounded by frauds, charlatans who use the language of the learned to dupe the ignorant; crypto-scams flourish, the most desperate turning to gambling as a final thrust at the mythical American Dream, their entire lived experience assuring them they are capable of attaining and - more fundamentally - owed the comfort of the suburban “norm.”
At the end of the day, the machine mindlessly cleaning streets to make way for a parade is a perfect representation of all our place within this system: inhuman and unworthy of so much as a check before you are removed in the name of something deemed better. Whether unable to access the medicines you need, withering as you are passed around ghost clinics or enmired in denial letters, or working two-and-a-half jobs to afford unpayable rent and food, recognize that you are the same. We are all disposable, one misfortune away from a death at the hands of a system which just wholeheartedly welcomed more of the same.
A Martyr to Capitalism, Cornelius Taylor was a Friend, Neighbor, and Family Member. He Deserved So Much Better. Rest in Power, Psycho.
For most, yesterday was an MLK Day marked by a distinct tinge of despair; a day normally taken as a time to introspect and reflect now turned into a day of clown car politics by the Trump administration. Many of us are left wondering at the blatant contradictions which are rapidly becoming undeniable throughout our daily lives. On a day set aside for one martyred in his fight against the our imperial methods of warmongering, extortion, and murder, we are helplessly pulled to the spectacle of it rebirthing itself in a parade of honor for the coming nightmare.
The United States continues to wander into a realm that even writers would balk at putting to paper; a version of the political apparatus, the social identity, that is so askew as to seem cartoonish. Alongside all the fancy of “authoritarian” regimes - the ceaseless warmongering and sanctioning of enemy and ally alike, the insulated oligarchy of the most wealthy and powerful, the wanton and widespread paranoia of neighbors and peers - there is also something more which seems to defy any realistic description in the current age. The closest I can come up with is the decidedly unacademic phrase born of contemporary pop-media: we are living in the “Upside-Down”-age of American empire.
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