Challenging Violence
This week a young person, Manuel Teran, who called themselves Tortuguita, was killed by police in an urban forest in Atlanta, Georgia. Multiple police groups attacked a peaceful protest encampment, in a day-long effort to dislodge forest protectors. The encampment is an effort to protect the forest from plans to turn it into a police training center. At least seven other protestors were arrested and charged that day with domestic terrorism. Protestors were living in tents and tree houses. Tortuguita was asleep when the assaults began.
The encampment is an effort to stop the building of Cop City, a $90 million, 85-acre police and fire training facility in the Weelaunee Forest in DeKalb County. Cop City is the project of a private organization, The Atlanta Police Foundation, and required an act of the local city council to overturn the 2017 designation of the forest as a protected, public area. It was considered one of the four living “city lungs” because of the dense tree canopy.
Advocates across the country are calling for an independent investigation into the killing.
This killing, and the brutality unleashed on the Forest Defenders is becoming all too familiar in our land. Here in Detroit we have similar uses of excessive force against those who protested police violence. Police used tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, sound cannons, flash grenades, chokeholds, and mass arrests without probable cause. In July of 2022, the City Council finally offered over $1 million to settle the lawsuit after a two-year court fight.
The motivation for the Atlanta protest also resonates with people in Michigan. Early last spring the National Guard announced plans to more than double the size of Camp Grayling in northern Michigan. Military backers of the expansion argued that Camp Grayling is “the perfect spot to learn how to strategically use artillery or fight in a cyber war.”
The proposed expansion would take an additional 250 miles of public land for military use. The backers envision Grayling as “a go-to spot for training state, national and international troops.”
Calling the expanded site, the National All Domain Warfighting Center, Major General Paul Rogers said, “Our goal is to create a lasting and healthy innovation capability for the Michigan National Guard and the defense industry at large.” He explained, “Michigan’s military training areas provide unique opportunities for defense industry innovators to generate and test ideas that solve mutually complex problems.”
The military industry wants to “ [make] Camp Grayling and the entire NADWC a destination for industry that allows them to collaborate, research and develop emerging technologies with military applications. This included partners with Camp Grayling and researchers from academia and industry who are exploring joint applications to advance multiple projects focused within the five domains of the NADWC, which are cyber, maritime, air, ground, and space.”
Tortuguita Teran died last week challenging this mad drive toward war and violence. The militarism embedded in our culture can only be stopped when many more of us join with people like Tortuguita, directly opposing the expansion of places dedicated to policies of death. We must begin to construct new ideas of safety and relationships among people and the planet. Tortuguita believed another way is possible. Finding it requires much more collective action from all of us.