Cloud Nine Higher

The view from the front lawn of the Historic Metropolitan Courthouse on the final weekend in August 2020 is a bit better than it was 90 days ago. But the glaring wounds from the final weekend of May 2020 are still all too obvious. And if you are ready to put Mayor John Cooper on a three year clock before we send him back to private life, I am right there with you. I would never hold Nashville back for three years. But barring a major turn of events, I will be voting for a change in the Office of the Metropolitan County Mayor in 2023. On or about May 30, 2020, John Cooper, realizing fully that we were still in Phase 2 of the COVID-19 reopening nightmare, found a reason to throw his own orders (or was that the orders of the public health department with the "encouragement" of the mayor?) out the window, wear a mask, and join thousands of protesters for a march protesting the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  Later that day, Cooper learned that the protests got a little cl...

In late May of this year as the murder of George Floyd spurred the "Black Lives Matter" protests across the nation, Nashville Mayor John Cooper piously cited the First Amendment as a justification for allowing large numbers of people to protest during the COVID-19 Phase 2 of reopening that limited gatherings to 25 people or less.  He then proceeded to personally join a protest that began well enough other than to blatantly violate his own coronavirus guidelines. As we are also aware, this peaceful protest also led to a debacle that in my view should never have happened. Allowing rioters to vandalize the Metropolitan Nashville Historic Courthouse (including a major local civil rights memorial) and to briefly terrorize the city is without excuse. And though Cooper is qualified, competent, and talented in his job as mayor, I believe that he shoulders part of the blame for the vandalism that embarrassingly led to police being overwhelmed and Lower Broadway businesses being affect...