For as long as I’ve lived in Fayette County, I’ve met a fair number of people who seem to think life here should resemble the pool at the Peachtree City Aquatic Center. Not in the “life’s a beach” way or a “jump off the deep end” way, but in how we go about our daily business compared to the rest of Atlanta. Let me explain:
Fayette County prides itself on offering a relatively safe environment, a comfortable standard of living and a quality public school system. Demographically we’ve got a mix of natives and newcomers, and Peachtree City in particular attracts airline families and probably a disproportionate number of golfers (not that the two are necessarily related). I’ve heard people who live outside Fayette refer to it as something of a country club, which the hardworking people in all parts of the county might rightly find dismissive and offensive.
In summer at the Aquatic Center, the two pools are full of kids and adults who swim for both pleasure and competition. Like the rest of the city, it’s an attractive and popular place. Each fall, when the sun’s not so hot and a chill arrives in the air, the city puts a big protective bubble over the two pools, keeping the ill winds at bay and everyone warm and comfy.
That’s OK for swimming pools, but not so much for entire towns.
If life as we know it in Fayette was measured by the comments found in local online forums and printed free-for-alls, you’d think the county’s “lifestyle bubble” was under more fire than the front lines in Fallujah. Each time a store is robbed or someone is assaulted, there’s an unsettling tendency for many people to fixate on whether the perpetrator was white or black and from inside or outside the county. They want to know who’s poking holes in our bubble, and many think they already know.
I looked up the crime statistics from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to see how we rank in Fayette. We’re pretty good but not bulletproof (so to speak). Our crime rates are lower than our more densely populated neighbors, but not much different from more comparable counties such as Douglas and Cherokee. And if what we lack in burglaries and other crime gets made up for in the kind of bigotry and cronyism that too easily plagues smaller towns, then we won’t have much to brag about.
By nature, bigger cities have bigger issues, but smaller areas aren’t immune to trouble. Fayette has made state and even national headlines with stories of a pot-smoking politician, the Chris Benoit murder-suicide and, most recently, a teenager arrested for shooting arrows into a family horse. Trouble doesn’t always barge in from out of town; sometimes it’s sitting right there on the front porch. It only takes a few pricks to burst a bubble, or at least deflate it a bit.
Fayette needs to think of itself as a greenhouse, not a bubble. Bubbles make you feel protected, but they don’t let in much light or fresh air. But a greenhouse lets you see there’s a diverse world out there that has as much (or more) good as bad to offer. It’s a place to live and grow, not to hide.
Jill Howard Church, a freelance writer, has lived in Fayette County since 1994.
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