Tuesday, January 09, 2007
We hear the shots
Fear and firepower
Will violent youths destroy what wind and water and fire could not?
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
by Chris Rose
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.
I've gotten several calls from national media outlets asking if I have time to
write up something about the recent crime uptick in New Orleans. What they
don't understand is that this isn't an uptick; it's simply a matter of shooters
exhibiting better aim than usual.
We are a community held hostage by our teenagers. What the hurricane couldn't
do, what the flood couldn't do, what political chicanery and incompetence could
not do, a random and soulless group of children can do.
They are children of violence, not nearly as smart or as rich as anyone else in
town but I ask you: What good is your Lexus and your Tulane MBA when your time
comes to go face to face with a child of New Orleans armed with nothing more
than a Glock and no fear of prison or death?
They say we need better schools and more cops and better drug rehab and all
that but I will tell you something that I know because I am a parent: You could
send all of these kids -- these killers -- to Newman and it wouldn't make any
difference without parents to make them care and work.
Crime is one of those elusive gremlins that statistics alone cannot address.
There can be X amount of murders and X amount of armed robberies and these make
for a numerical quantification of the problem but a wave of violent crime that
we are witnessing creates an unquantifiable effect on a community that you
can't put in a pie chart.
Dread doesn't graph well. Because it doesn't matter whether danger is real or
perceived; if people don't feel safe, it doesn't matter if numerical analysis
supports or counters their fear. We can handle wind and water and fire. But
what we've got on our hands is something that neither FEMA nor Road Home can
fix.
As I began writing this column -- on Sunday night -- my young neighbor came
over to tell me that, as she put her key in the door of her apartment, she
thought she saw a light go out inside but she was sure her roommates were not
home.
Would I come in with her, she asked me, and check it out?
The answer was yes, of course I will. This is the sort of perfunctory
neighborly chore I have performed scores of times in my life, something I
didn't even really think about because it always turned out to be nothing at
all to be concerned about.
Yet, as I walked into her apartment and drew further in, room by room, turning
on lights and looking under beds and behind closet doors, a shot of fear surged
through me: Is this the moment where I die?
Am I over-reacting? Being melodramatic? Paranoid? Crazy?
I hear the gunshots at night and I think not. If I'm crazy, it's for thinking
we can be a better community still, that we can heal from within. Some way,
somehow, don't ask me how.
I don't know. But if I am crazy, it's because I still think this is the right
place to live and work, the right place to raise my family, the right place to
face the future. But the arguments that counter this are getting stronger every
day.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, or (504)
826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.
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