Let’s talk about what’s on your mind

23rd December 2013   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund W. Lewis,
Editor

As the year 2013 comes to an end and the sun is about to rise on 2014, what’s on your mind?

Are you thinking about the outcome of the Trayvon Martin case and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, or perhaps the still unresolved New Orleans cases of Henry Glover, the Danziger Bridge massacre and the shooting of 14-year-old Marshall Coulter by Merritt Landry?

Are you thinking about how tightly the shackles of economic enslavement and educational apartheid are being placed on the wrists, ankles and minds of Black folks in this city?

Are you thinking about how the issue of Black-on-Black violence has been politicized and used to benefit elected officials whose every action in office shows how little regard they have for the lives of the city’s Black and poor residents?

Are you thinking about the city’s still-struggling young people and the many schools that are doing no more than miseducating them, warehousing them or preparing them for lives as servants and prison inmates?

Are you thinking about the many elected officials who constantly jump from post to post when term limits compel them to vacate office and how their efforts to maintain their standard of living trump their commitment to representing the interests of their constituents?

Are you thinking about all of the non-profits making money hand over fist while claiming to address the needs of the city’s least-fortunate residents?

Whatever you’re thinking about, don’t keep it to yourself. Speak your mind and share your thoughts with your friends, co-workers, loved ones and neighbors. You might be surprised to learn how many of those around you share your beliefs and views about the state of the city, nation and world.

Let’s kick off that sharing with some questions being asked in greater frequency as the year draws to a close. Here goes:

• Did we really need another major study to tell us that the inequitable distribution wealth is crippling the U.S. economy?

• Isn’t it sad that New Orleans couldn’t even have a celebration of Nelson Mandela without the mayor handpicking the participants, having his staff call them and question them about what they were going to say at the program and only allowing ministers and “Black leaders” who were in his back pocket to actively participate?

• Do you think the mayor is losing any sleep over the plight of the city’s low-income seniors who will struggle to pay steep Sewerage & Water Board rate hikes over the next two decades?

• Why were so many folks upset about the handshakes between President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro Ruz while nobody has said anything about Obama’s handshakes with a number of officials in Israel, which did not hesitate to contribute weaponry and other assistance to the white apartheid regime in South Africa?

• Have you noticed that New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu was nowhere to be found and had absolutely nothing to say after a federal jury acquitted former NOPD officer David Warren in his retrial for the murder of Henry Glover?

• Didn’t it make you proud to see the Glover family and a group of community activists and residents pile into Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard’s Office to demand that he classify the death of Henry Glover as a homicide?

• How many people expect Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, the same district attorney that has not lifted a finger to file charges against Merritt Landry for shooting 14-year-old Marshall Coulter in the head in July, to actually file charges against former NOPD officer David Warren, the cop who shot Henry Glover on the West Bank just days after Hurricane Katrina?

• Was anyone surprised that one of the Landrieu administration’s deputy mayors was selected to take over the reins of the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board?

• Why is Sheppard, Mullin, Richter and Hampton, the Washington, DC-based firm tapped by U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan to serve as federal monitor of the NOPD consent decree, perpetuating the myth that it was New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu who first asked Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the New Orleans Police Department?

• Isn’t it way past time for Attorney General Eric Holder to come down to New Orleans and clean house once and for all in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana?

• How many people in New Orleans who are not at all happy with former U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s job performance, particularly the bungling of the Henry Glover and Danziger Bridge post-Katrina cases will let Sen. Mary Landrieu know how angry they are about her refusal to replace Letten despite urgent pleas from Black leaders?

• Isn’t it both pathetic and ironic that the City of New Orleans would even dare to honor the life and contributions of South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela while doing everything in its power to bring an apartheid-esque reality to the Crescent City?

• With the mayor hand-picking MLK Jr. Committee members and participants, selecting colored appointees to various boards and commissions from a Binder of Recyclable Negroes, trying to tell Black judges where they can build a new Civil Court building and deciding when and how the city will celebrate the legacy of African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, can we really call New Orleans “Chocolate City”?

• Is anyone really surprised that many of the institutions receiving vouchers are failing schools, which essentially means that poor Black children have traded one set of underperforming schools for another?

• Who thinks anyone will ever ad­mit that the whole charter movement, the takeover of New Orleans Public Schools and the mass firing of NOPS administrators, and teachers were nothing more than a blatant move to dismantle the local teachers union, a camouflaged money-grab and an effort to use poor Black kids as educational guinea pigs?

• Why do you suppose local, statewide and federal lawmakers from this region have had so little to say about efforts by the powers that be to turn back the clock by whitewashing the CBD, raising the cost of living in New Orleans, ripping apart the New Orleans Public Schools, depriving Black residents of justice and equal protection under the law and preparing Black children for lives of servitude and/or incarceration?

• Are you registered to vote in February’s mayoral election?

• If Black people keep doing the same things and expecting different results, how will 2014 be any different than 2013?

This article originally published in the December 23, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.