We’re kicking off the new year with a big bang. Actually, lots of small bangs: the sounds of pervasive gunfire. People are dying, and it’s not just the gangland drug dealers. A mom and dad with their 2 year old daughter got shot in Marigny. She died and he’s in the hospital, wounded protecting their daughter. Stuff like that.
The mayor is meeting with the chief of police, and ideas are being floated around (e.g. reinstitute the 2 am curfew, which is not the sort of thing that the French Quarter folks who are hoping for a resurgence in tourism want to hear). Explanations are offered for the crime rise, usually by local officials who have no idea how to curtail the violence and so they want to make the problem seem overblown.
Chris Rose, the passionate chronicler of Katrina life (a transplant from up north who settled in New Orleans and loves this city more than many of its native born residents) is wondering if it’s time to leave. I wonder the same thing.
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I left New Orleans before Katrina. Luckily I did not have to endure this last, huge dissapointment, yet one more piece of evidence that the city I moved to in the 70s had drastically changed in the last generation. I wish I could put my finger one what it is exactly. But I can’t. I only know that New Orleans every day seemed angier to me, more race-obsessed, violent, hopeless and just about as laughingly far from the so-called “Carnival Town” as any place could get.
Add in the overwhelming geographical realities that we now all know make future and very significant flooding on a Katrina scale likely, and you can only come to one reasonble conclusion: New Orleans is doomed.
or why one should return…….
You are not the only one wondering that, not by far…