Change is in the air
22nd September 2014 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
After a bad credit loans with no phone calls long, hot summer filled with lots of heat, humidity and drama about fatal cop shootings, brazen gun battles on the streets of New Orleans and athletes behaving badly, Fall is finally here. Hopefully, now that temperatures will at least begin to gradually drop and northern breezes will finally reach these parts. Cooler heads will begin to prevail and we can focus more on the issues at hand.
Among those issues are ongoing efforts to build a school for Black children in a majority-Black city with a majority-Black City Council on a toxic landfill, the continued spread of gentrification across the city and the use of funds earmarked to rebuild neighborhoods to rebuild and enhance areas that were not in the least bit affected by Hurricane Katrina’s toxic floodwaters.
Hopefully, with cooler temperatures we will get out more and support the efforts of grassroots organizations and community leaders to move our community forward and support ongoing efforts to make sure that the NOPD does what the U.S. Department of Justice requires it to do to become compliant with federal standards for constitutional policing.
Rather than just talk about the weather and predict the first real cool front of the season, let’s turn up the heat on elected officials who refuse to do their jobs and think they owe Black and poor people nothing in return for their votes on election day. Let’s talk about strategies for making it crystal clear to elected officials who are living like kings and queens that their expiration date has arrived and their services are no longer needed. Let’s start coming up with a game plan to make sure everyone in the community makes it to the polls on election day and that every resident of this city is aware of the myriad of issues that are of critical importance to communities of color.
Let’s get started:
• How happy and satisfied are you with local, statewide and national elected officials’ commitment to keeping you, your family and others in the community safe from environmental hazards?
• If we keep electing and re-electing city councilmen, state legislators and congressmen who refuse to do anything for communities of color, whose fault is it that we keep getting the shaft?
• If pressured to do so, could you name three elected officials from this region who consistently fight for economic justice, voting rights, civil rights and equal protection under the law?
• What message is a police department in the middle of a federal consent decree trying to send to the community and the U.S. Department of Justice when it refuses to use the body and dash cameras it installed to record police interaction with civilians?
• Will the possibility of being ambushed or gunned down by brazen criminals be enough to convince some cops to turn on their body cameras and dash cameras?
• Who thinks this police department or City Hall spends any appreciable amount of time focusing on bringing constitutional policing to New Orleans?
• Why is it the mainstream media is just starting to talk about the murder of Victor White, an unarmed Black man who was placed in handcuffs by New Iberia police when authorities say he managed to find a gun and kill himself?
• Why haven’t the many budding social media activists who showed up this summer to protest the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri also showed up to protest efforts by the Recovery School District to build a new high school for Black children on a toxic landfill in Central City?
• Why hasn’t Ms. Kira Orange Jones, New Orleans’ representative on the state’s Board of Elementary & Secondary Education, cash loan needed today said or done anything about plans to build Cohen College Prep on top of the toxic landfill at the Booker T. Washington Sr. High School site?
• Why do we keep our money in banks that refuse to offer us loans with reasonable interest rates or invest in the communities where they are located?
• Why should we reward elected officials who have been in office for 10, 15 or 20 years for helping to make Louisiana Ground Zero for the nation’s ever-growing prison industrial complex or ensuring that Louisiana continues to have a dismal record of addressing poverty, unemployment, hunger, illiteracy, homelessness and kids’ well-being?
• How badly will Gov. Piyush Jindal have to wreck Louisiana to have a shot at the GOP presidential nomination?
• What has Sen. Mary Landrieu done to address Gov. Jindal’s efforts to block Medicaid expansion in Louisiana?
• What do you suppose former EPA head Lisa Jackson and Sen. Landrieu think about the Recovery School District’s efforts to build a shiny, new $55 million high school on top of a toxic landfill?
• How closely are you watching the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s race?
• How often does your family get to eat and prepare a home-cooked meal together?
• When was the last time you extended a random act of kindness toward someone in the community?
• What book, film or song inspires you to be your best self?
• How much time a week do you spend on self-examination, meditation and reflection?
• When was the last time you thought about organizing a book drive for one of the city’s underfunded schools or volunteering as a mentor to a young person in need of direction?
This article originally published in the September 22, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
