any suggestions for someone who believes riots are necessary for change and is /still/ saddened to see local organizations and their buildings getting destroyed? obviously they are nowhere near as important as Black lives, but it's hard to accept collateral damage.
One day in the 80s my parents were driving around looking for someplace to get dinner. None of their usual haunts sounded good so they just kept driving until they were 20 miles from home and found “Chicken Joint,” which was a weird little barbecue chicken restaurant. They went in and gave it a try and were floored by how amazing the food was.
Chicken Joint became a regular date night dinner place for them. They started going once or twice a month. They started taking friends way out to Chicken Joint, they started taking me and my sister.
Finally, when my parents bought a house they settled on a place that happened to be only a couple miles away from Chicken Joint. When they closed escrow they went to Chicken Joint to celebrate.
We ate at Chicken Joint for years. It was a small business owned by an immigrant family and it always had this quirky decor and great food. I grew up on Chicken Joint chicken. I introduced my fiancee to Chicken Joint and it became a date night place for us too.
In 2018 their landlords told them they would no longer rent to Chicken Joint. They offered to pay more rent, they offered to buy the lot. There were community fundraisers, Facebook pages created to Save Chicken Joint, and eventually a sad parade of block-long lines of regulars going every day to get some chicken one last time before Chicken Joint shut down for good.
The week before they closed I went to Chicken Joint and picked up a few plates on my birthday to take to my parents’ house. Chicken Joint is the last meal I sat down and ate with my mom before she died.
But the funny thing is that when the owner retired because he was Done With This Bullshit he passed on his recipes to the staff who had worked there for years and three blocks away a new place opened up called Jointed Chicken.
They’re in a new, smaller spot. They aren’t open on the same schedule and if you want to know when to order it helps to follow their instagram. But it’s the same cooks making the chicken, the same waitresses serving it, and the same awesome food I grew up on.
Anyway, the landlords tore down the old building and now there’s a Popeye’s where Chicken Joint used to be, and I guess corporate signed a five-year lease or something because the same people own the property.
And that was BEFORE the global economic crisis.
My friend, I know of a ton of local businesses and organizations that lost their locations in the last few months because their landlords wouldn’t cut them a deal on rent and would rather have a building sit empty than accept a lower rent payment.
The organization isn’t destroyed, it lost its brick-and-mortar location. I’m sure some lovely buildings were lost but how long was it really going to take before most of those were going to be torn down or converted into condos anyway?
Buildings and storefronts are constantly lost to shit like rent hikes, natural disasters, and gentrification. Honestly I think it’s better to see a building burn as part of a purposeful statement of outrage than because the local power monopoly didn’t maintain its infrastructure and of those two things the second one seems to happen a lot more frequently.
If you’re worried about the organization and don’t want to see it go under, support that organization. If your local library got burned down in a riot support the library when it’s time to rebuild, but the building will always matter much, much less than what people were doing in it.
TL;DR capitalism does much more damage to community organizations and local institutions than riots do and it does it more frequently - support the ideas behind things and the people who make them because that’s what matters.
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