Hi Jeff,

This is a sad day in America.

In the course of my rally to save the Atlanta Breuer, I got called everything under the sun.  I even had architects who were pretending to be my friend--pretending to be advocates for preservation--turn around and stab me in the back; slandering my name all along the way.  Just ask Susan Miller, she got to witness some of it, up close and personal.  The local paper painted me as the lone, crazed, fanatical liberal; the "angry black man" drunk on nostalgia, detached from reality.  And in a public hearing of the county commissioners, one of the commissioners, a black female no less, called me a demon from hell.

But you know what? I don't give a flying fuck.

I stood up to all those crummy bastards, not because I was some veteran activist (because I'm totally not) but because I was so outraged and offended, that for a while I completely lost my mind.  I gave up being who I had been before, and became a totally different animal.

All I knew was that come hell or high water, that building was going to stand.  It was a moment in my life where I came to understood what Dr. King meant when he said "if a man hasn't found something to die for, he's not fit to live."

Yet would I have literally given my life for that building?  I can't say for sure.  However, I clearly demonstrated [in action] that I was willing to sacrafice my own career as an artist, putting invaluable friendships on the line; doing what I had to do to make it abundantly clear that I was not going to sit down and shut up.  I made up my mind, at what point I'm not entirely sure, that I was going to do whatever I had to do "by any means necessary" as Malcolm X used to say.

I made up my mind.

The American Revolution, the women rights movement, the civil rights movement, and all other movements were not won by half-ass attempts.  Those people upped their game and went for broke.

And for naysayers who say architecture isn't as important as civil rights, I beg to differ.  For instance, what would the people of Paris do if some French politician got in kahootz with a business owner, deciding to demolish the I.M. Pei Pyramid of the Louvre?  And how would the people of Berlin respond to an attempt to demolish the Bauhaus school located there?  Of course the responses would vary widely, but I can promise you one thing, at the end of the day, those sites would be left standing!  And not just internationally significant sites like those, but ordinary sites too.

Europeans tend not to demolish things.  For in the Western world, demolition brain is by and large an American phenomena.

I think you are courageous for claiming your part (however small) in allowing this criminal event to go down; literally.  And, I don't even live there, but I too feel in part to blame.

As an American, an event like this is very humiliating...a horrific failure, which signals to the brain-dead, power-elite, and the slack-ass citizenry, that  it's okay to fuck-up a good thing.  An event like this scars the psyche--tearing the collective soul apart--sending out a message to our youth  that their (our) place in history has no lasting value...nothing matters...you and I are garbage.

Cleveland needs a lightening rod moment, something to jolt the core of consciousness.

I'm so hurt.