Jarvis DeBerry: Violence mocks our state of denial Posted by Jarvis DeBerry, Columnist, The Times-Picayune February 27, 2009
"A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage. 'The Emperor is naked,' he said."
-- from "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen
Tuesday afternoon as a truck parade rolled down St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans had a moment of clarity about as startling as the one that prompted the boy in the fairy tale to honestly recount what he saw.
We saw that the barriers we've told ourselves separate the so-called bad neighborhoods from the good ones and keep criminals from interfering with the daily activities of decent folks are not only invisible, but they also happen to be nonexistent.
Police say seven innocent bystanders were shot as the parade moved through the Garden District, including two men around the age of 20 who were shot in the abdomen and hospitalized in serious condition. In addition to those two victims, a 20-month-old boy sustained a graze wound to his back; a 17-year-old girl was shot in the thigh; a 50-year-old woman was shot in the elbow; a 15-year-old boy was grazed in the back, and a 30-year-old man was grazed in the thigh.
Police booked 20-year-old Mark Brooks with seven counts of attempted murder and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. They booked 28-year-old Lazone Lewis with seven counts of principal to attempted murder.
Brooks had pleaded guilty in 2008 to possession of crack cocaine and was wearing a court-ordered ankle monitoring device when he was arrested, police said. Lewis pleaded guilty in November to marijuana possession and soon after being sentenced to probation was shot in the abdomen at an intersection in Central City.
Central City borders the Garden District. But we've grown accustomed to shootings occurring in one of those neighborhoods, but not the other. We've had faith in a barrier that would stop the violence from reaching St. Charles Avenue, let alone crossing over to the other side.
Funny how we believed in the invisible for so long, especially in a city where the character of a neighborhood often changes block to block. However, denial is a powerful hallucinogen; in this case, it caused residents to see a security barrier that never existed.
No one group is any more guilty than another for thinking that way. Who among us doesn't make distinctions between neighborhoods they believe to be safe and those they believe to be less so? Denial arises when we tell ourselves that street violence can be contained, when we tell ourselves that we're safe so long as the victims live a couple blocks or a couple neighborhoods away.
As the Rev. John Raphael noted in his eulogy for 2-year-old murder victim Ja'Shaun Powell, the problem is when we decide that other people's victimization makes violence exclusively the problem of other people.
That isn't a call to paranoia so much as it is an acknowledgment that unchecked violence in certain neighborhoods is going to eventually cross the boundaries and reach people who are not expecting it.
And if the police can't figure out a way to sharply reduce the violence in the places where we've come to expect and accept violence, then their security efforts in the quieter places will also be compromised.
The police had the parade route covered Tuesday afternoon, and yet the sound of gunshots still rang out.
That's proof that to some criminals, a strong police presence isn't a deterrent.
So you know an imaginary line between neighborhoods is not."
So, please, lefty leftys, please keep funding these thugs. With my paycheck at that. Because guess what? These guys DO NOT work. They've never been taught to work or value accomplishment...or life, at that. These fellas have been taught to depend on someone else OR to gain your belongings by taking from someone else.
The more money you pump into thug communities like this, the less likely we will ever get out of a recession. These are not the consumers. BUT they are the ones that qualify for welfare.
I must admit. Lately I've become disgusted at my government...and they have yet to do anything to change my mind.
Do you have to follow US tax laws in the Virgin Islands?
1 comments:
SG -- yep. The Virgins are U.S. territory. Try the Caymans.
I guess I must admit that I'm one of the ones that pumps money toward the thugs. And a cell phone and a purse. In the front hall of my own home in one of those purportedly "safe" neighborhoods in New Orleans.
Oh, wait. That was because the thug had a gun pointed at my head.
Mr. DeBerry needs to understand that there are many of us who learned the hard way that there is no imaginary line separating places of expected violence from safehavens. For more than a year now I've looked over my shoulder when I get out of my car no matter the time of day, and I have a husband who packs heat when he walks the dog.
Ain't NO sanctuary in NOLA.
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