It's OK to Feel Grief for Old Nashville

I was listening to Pod Bless Nashville, the podcast hosted by Jamie Hollin and Braden Gall, where Hollin is a brilliant curmudgeon and Gall is the city’s ombudsman. A recent episode features guest Ben Eagles, a political operative and man who picks fights with people he likes on Twitter. At about the 24-minute mark, Eagles launches into a lecture about self-esteem:

You can’t choose your problems, but if you could, you would choose Nashville’s over just about any other place in America in terms of our set of problems and how we got those and what that means. That means people want to move here, they want to start a business here, your kids when they graduate from college want to move back here. Those are all great things. 

That comes with traffic, comes with rising cost of living, and we have to figure out how to reckon with that, but those forces did not change in four years. 

Something that we’ve kind of got to work on — and I recognize the irony of me saying this having managed Cooper’s campaign and the rhetoric that we used to talk about downtown and the focus of the previous mayors — but we have to get better as a city about positive self-talk.

It shocks people who come here to Nashville and they see what’s happening here and then you tell them, “Yeah, people are really upset about it all.”

There are ways to talk about the cost of housing and the need for more density and the need for transit and the need for improvements with our schools. There are ways to do that and continue to work on all of that while maintaining a kind of positive stance about the city in a way that we do not have now.  

I know we’re past the "You Are So Nashville If ..." issue for this year, but I posit that you are so Nashville if you believe that the locals should just grin and play along with whatever’s happening so that visitors don’t feel upset or confused. Sure, let’s all get together and stand in front of houses we can’t afford in neighborhoods we can’t get to without driving, wave at the tourists and do our best, “Y’all come back now, ya hear?” 

A jerk with a grudge blew up our downtown. We were hit hard by a deadly pandemic that had the side effect of revealing which of our neighbors were giant assholes who don’t care about anybody but themselves. Tiny children were gunned down in their school. People lined up to speak against the stadium deal and it didn’t do any good. People went to the Capitol, day after day, to protest for better gun laws, and it didn’t work. We had a threat against one of our public schools that was serious enough to send it into lockdown and a side effect of it was having to traumatize the kids with an intense police response. We have a fascist gas station. People who’ve lived here all their lives can’t afford to stay.

I don’t think it’s angst. I think it’s grief. And the grief is that we want to make Nashville a better place, but all the ways we know to do it — working within the system, protesting against it, banding together with our neighbors and so on — aren’t working.

Seriously. My brother just moved back to Nashville. He’s got a really good job, and he and I are making similar amounts of money. He can’t find a place to live that he can afford. And what is the positive stance I’m supposed to take? Sorry you can’t find a place that you and your family will fit into that is near a school you feel OK about sending your kids to, but gosh, think of how great it is that Nashville is so popular! Hey, sure, you have to commute an hour each way, but think of how much time that gives you to call people and tell them how great Nashville is!

Shoot, when I’m done with that, maybe I’ll go find some of the folks who are living down by the creek near my parents and tell them that we sure are lucky Nashville’s weather is so mild.

I can try to Zig Ziglar myself and the city into having better self-esteem, or politicians can start making regular Nashvillians feel like we matter. I’m genuinely not sure which is more likely to happen.