So, one day you look down and see your feet in shoes you don't recognize. Maybe you like them, maybe you don't. This is where life begins. Welcome to WSATA, where the Goddess returns.
Front page of the New Orleans Times Picayune, Mother's Day 2013,
featuring mothers who've lost children
to gun violence.
On Mother's Day morning, I found the Sunday edition of the New Orleans Times Picayune on my lawn. The picture here shows that day's front page. The headline of the feature story on the left reads, "Mothers talk about losing a child to violence." For many readers this is already yesterday's news, overshadowed later that Mother's Day by another mass shooting injuring 20 people, but as a resident of New Orleans, I can't simply shelve it away and move on.
The woman in the upper right corner of the graphic holding a picture of her daughter is Margaret Washington. Margaret is one of my church members and an hour before I saw the front page, I had hugged her tightly after our Mother's Day church service. She is one of the few non-relatives I come in contact with who knew my mother who passed away in 2008. My mother was almost old enough to have been Margaret's mother, but they knew each other as Dillard University alumni and as members of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
I knew Mother's Day had to be difficult for Margaret. On October 1, her daughter Marguerite, a student at Dillard, was shot to death while visiting her boyfriend in New Orleans East. I still remember getting the phone call from my aunt, telling me what happened. Someone out to murder the boyfriend, Justin Alexander, shot through his window, wounding him and killing Marguerite. Read the full post at BlogHer.com.
I received an email on Monday (May 13) from BlogHer's News and Politics Editor Grace Hwang Lynch looking for people willing to write about the Mother's Day shooting. When I saw it, I was annoyed. No. I was angry in a way I couldn't understand. I figured that people not from here thought the incident was another "mass shooting story" like Newtown or Aurora, but I knew better.
I figured New Orleans would be all over the news for the wrong reasons again, CNN, ABC, NBC up in our faces aiming their cameras at our freakish dysfunction. I kept thinking, these people aren't here. They won't understand. They don't love us. Some of them will just watch like we're a train wreck, too. Oh, I hope they catch these guys, lock 'em up, and throw away the key.
Testy, I wrote to the editor:
Why does [your website] want to cover it? It's bangers shooting into crowds, which unfortunately is not that unusual down here now and not the kind of story [the website] has covered before. I'm not against the coverage. I'm just curious. Why now and what's the angle? It happened in my ward. I drove through the crowd about two hours before it happened.
Grace wrote back very graciously explaining her ideas on a possible angle. She thought that perhaps people would see a connection between this story and the gun violence/control debates that emerged after Newtown, the discussion that seems to have been shelved. She mentioned the 5-year-old who shot and killed his sister and the numbers of young people dying from gun violence around the country. She also said that perhaps the story was that the New Orleans shooting would not be perceived as the Newtown shooting had been.
Still on edge, I wrote back:
In the case of the Newtown shooting, gun violence got attention mainly because it was children who were shot in an otherwise "non-violent" middle-class area. The New Orleans shooting should not be perceived the same as Newtown unless it is proven that the person shooting was a lone gunman who is not connected to the circumstances behind our typical shootings down here. Usually, it's some impulse-control-deficient idiot who sees a rival from another gang and doesn't care that he has to shoot into a crowd to shoot that rival.
The kind of gun violence that goes on in New Orleans will not be solved by ID [background] checks. ID checks assume gun violence is far more simple than it is. I'd be shocked to learn the shooter in last night's incident bought his gun from a legitimate dealer. And yet, the kinds of solutions it would take to curb the violence in New Orleans are unlikely to ever be undertaken by legislators that can't even bring themselves to pass legislation as simple as ID checks.
I don't know what to say. I guess I'll wait to see what [another writer who offered to cover it] writes. I'm somewhere between numb and raving mad about this shooting. So, I'm having trouble seeing how a blog piece related to gun violence in general can even come close to approaching the depth needed to address the trouble we're having in New Orleans.
All I can say is that we've had these troubles long before the Newtown shooting. Gun violence in New Orleans is connected to poverty, the disproportionate number of black people being sent to prison, the criminalization of drug use, a lack of jobs, a dysfunctional education system, and other issues. Yesterday's shooting is not the same as the Newtown shooting and the only comparison that can be made is that somebody had a gun.
Look at how quickly the outrage over Newtown faded. If America can't force Congress to address gun violence in the wake of mostly little white children being shot, what hope is there for families suffering in a city like New Orleans?
Below are just a few of the [gun violence] stories I have either mentioned or [have] been aware of or [have] been connected to in the last year. I add them so that you or anyone else reading will know why I am so frustrated.
Yesterday morning, Mother's Day, a big front page spread on our daily paper's front page of mothers who've lost children to gun violence, one of whom is a friend of mine. Her daughter was shot last year by someone who was after the girl's boyfriend.
There was nothing wrong about the editor's query. She made a reasonable request, but the Mother's Day shooting had undone me. Years of worry and stress fell on me at once, it seemed. . . . Return to my BlogHer.com post.
Too hilarious to miss is the video above of Saturday Night Live character Stefon's marriage to Anderson Cooper. The skit marked the last time we'll see Bill Hader regularly doing his Stefon report on Weekend Update with Seth Myers. Saturday, May 18, was Hader's last show as a cast member.
Below is a 2011 clip from the David Letterman show in which Hader talks about how he came up with the Stefon character and how he could never keep a straight face when he did the Stefon segments.
In the video above, CNN's Jake Tapper interviews Shonda Rhimes, the creator of ABC's hit show Scandal and the long-running Grey's Anatomy. Rhimes talks about what drew her to Judy Smith's life. Smith is the real woman whose work as a crisis manager inspired Scandal.
Rhimes also discusses with Tapper that the show is the first show in 40 years to feature a black woman as the lead character. The other show ran in the late 60s and early 70s, Julia starring Diahann Carroll.
Rhimes grew up watching very little television. Her parents were in academia. According to an interview with the New York Times, a competitive nature pushed her toward film school when she graduated from Dartmouth.
In this second interview, Rhimes talks about wielding power in Hollywood.
Tonight is Scandal's season finale, and I know Twitter will be atwitter discussing every detail. I'll be watching. Will you?
The man in the photo aims at the scattering crowd attending the New Orleans Mother's Day Second Line Parade. Police are currently searching for the suspect, allegedly Akein Scott. But did you notice that small child?
Yesterday, I didn't write much about the mass shooting in New Orleans on Mother's Day. Despite my having started the Urban Mother's Book of Prayers years ago, I had little to say in public. I was somewhere between numb and raving mad, I wrote to someone in email.
We've had so many shootings here, far too many during which a gunman decides to shoot into a crowd or have a shootout on a busy street. We had at least three incidents of innocent bystanders wounded or killed by stray bullets during shootouts last year.
Multiple reports and documentaries have focused on the toll gun violence is taking on New Orleans, especially on our children. Yesterday, I posted the trailer for Shellshocked, one such film.
Yesterday afternoon, I saw a video at NOLA.com of children being interviewed at school about the shooting. All who spoke were terrified, unable to sleep well.
And this morning NOLA.com reports that one of the 10-year-old victims grazed by a bullet at the Mother's Day Shooting is the cousin of little Briana Allen. Ka'Nard Allen was the birthday boy that fateful day when Briana was killed. He was grazed that day, too, at his birthday party. So, with the Mother's Day shooting, he's a victim of gunfire again. He doesn't want to talk about any of this, says the article. You can see how this violence is too much for us all, especially children. See the video below. In it one child questions why anyone has a gun.
Apropos posting given yesterday's shooting at the Mothers' Day second line parade in New Orleans. From the film's website.
New Orleans, Louisiana is the murder capital of the United States. For the last decade, statistics have shown murder rates four to six times higher than the national average. Eighty percent of the victims are black males, mostly in their teenage years. This is the city's greatest neglected crisis with profound implications for the issues of violence and crime most American cities face. New Orleans government, law enforcement, community leaders, and well-intentioned citizens cannot agree on a prognosis or a solution to this situation. Wherever a disagreement is escalating into violence, an execution is being planned, or a victim is taking his last breath, it is more than likely a youth is witnessing or carrying out these actions.
Shell Shocked attempts to bridge the gap of this disconnect by hearing the ideas, opinions, and testimonies from activists, community leaders, police, city officials, youth program directors, family and friends of victims, and the children who live in these violent circumstances. We are looking for positive solutions to an extremely negative situation.
All I can say is watch Candice Glover, listen to her sing "Somewhere" from West Side Story. I'm going to iTunes for my copy.
Here are a few other renditions of this song. First and possibly most well-known is Barbra Streisand's performance, followed by Aretha Franklin's soulful jazz version, which far fewer people have heard. More recent is Josh Grobin and Charlotte Church's duet (the song was originally a duet), and then Lea Michelle and Idina Menzel version from Glee.
Aretha Franklin's soulful jazz version.
Josh and Charlotte.
Glee. ( Lea Michele and Idina Menzel)
Here are older versions. The duet from the 1961 movie is what made more people in American know the song because most folks did not get to Broadway to see the original cast.
Sinkholes fascinate and terrify me. They have for years, long before I heard about the story of the man whose bedroom was sucked into one in Florida in February. So, when I see a story about sinkholes on the news or online, I have to watch or read, and lately, if the report is about sinkholes in general, like the video posted above, I wait to see whether the reporter covers the mess we've got here in Louisiana right now at Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish.
While sinkholes generally are a natural phenomenon, the Bayou Corne sinkhole was caused by human error related to the extraction of brine by Texas Brine from the Napoleon Salt Dome's caverns. The company has agreed to pay settlements to residents who've lost or will lose their homes. It's possible, according to a Texas Brine engineer, the sinkhole may keep expanding for another year.
The Bayou Corne disaster also reminds me of another Louisiana incident related to salt domes, the Lake Peigneur drilling catastrophe of 1980. The Lake Peigneur disaster was the result of a Texaco oil drilling miscalculation near a salt dome. The video below explains what happened there.
