Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Misery is a warm gun


The New Orleans Times-Picayune's indispensible Chris Rose is at it again:

I hear the shots.

During late night walks in my neighborhood, sometimes I hear the not-so-distant reports of gunfire.

I wait for the sirens and lights to come, but they don't. In the morning, I tear through the Metro section of this paper, looking for the news, but there isn't any.

It's like the tree falling in the woods, I guess. If no one is killed or injured, it didn't really happen.

It's only a statistic when a victim bites the asphalt, a piece of steel buried in his chest or leg or head.

Everyone I know hears the shots. They get muffled by the sound of fireworks this time of year, but soon the fireworks will stop. The gunshots will not.

My neighborhood is the quietest of them all. Safe, in a relative sense. Very relative.

Down in the 7th, the 8th and the 9th, it's part of the aural fabric of the darkness, rat-tat-tat, the deadly game played on street corners by the Children of the Night.

They play a game called Somebody Dies Tonight. Question is, will it be someone you know -- a doctor, an artist, a musician -- so you'll get all up in arms about it and march on City Hall? Or will it be another nameless, faceless child of the streets, a killer at 17, dead himself at 18?

Should we mourn them any less?

I did not tell my wife about the shots I sometimes hear on my walks until this weekend because I don't want to move away from New Orleans. This is neither the time nor the place to dwell on the many reasons I don't want to go. For the sake of argument, it's just a given.

But how close to my house do I allow the shots to come before I claim no mas? How many more friends and acquaintances will die stupidly in their cars and yards and doorways before I realize that I have become more afraid of and for my city than ever before and am bordering on a siege mentality?

I've written about this before -- the pervasive predatory element of New Orleans -- and truth to tell, I don't have anything new to contribute to the conversation. But then again, I can't sit here at my desk and write about anything else -- the Saints, the weather, the Road Home, trash collection, whatever -- without thinking that it's all kind of moot when the cloud of murder descends over the city.

Again. And again. And again. And again.

We rise up, we get mad, we yell about it at City Council meetings and preachers decry it from the pulpits and the cops get down and dirty for a few weeks and then . . .

And then?

Then it gets quiet, except for the gunshots at night that are trees falling in the woods and we wait until the cycle starts again and then we get all a-tizzy about it again and then rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.


READ. REFLECT. Consider that this is America, not Baghdad.

Get angry. Get very angry.

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