So many questions, so little time
30th January 2012 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis,
Editor
With a number of local political races less than two months away, Fat Tuesday quickly approaching and this year’s U.S. presidential race heating up, there’s definitely a hint of something crisp and exciting in the air. Anyone who places a premium on vigorous political debate and efforts to seduce the human mind — both on Fat Tuesday and on Election Day — has to be excited about how 2012 is shaping up. When else can you find stories about a leading GOP presidential candidate who wants to establish a U.S. colony on the moon, a group of candidates who openly admit that “beating Obama” is more important than advancing the goals of their respective party or regaining control of the White House, and fierce debate about who makes the best King Cake in the Big Uneasy? And how often do you get to see the president’s political adversaries criticizing his message even before he had delivered his 2012 State of the Union address? Before we immerse ourselves completely in those indulgences, let’s take a moment to ask some questions lingering on the minds of many of the people I meet when I’m walking down the streets of New Orleans. Here goes:
• Is there a better example of political mediocrity and moral myopia on the planet than GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich?
• Where is the scripture in the Bible that says a married man can abandon his ailing wife not once but twice to marry his mistress?
• Ninety-seven years after the premiere of “Birth of a Nation,” why is it still so easy for a white politician to convince tens of millions of white Americans that any and every Black man is the boogeyman?
• Now that the Krewe of Endymion has announced its first Black king in the organization’s 45-year history, how much longer will it be before Rex, which was founded in 1872, follows suit?
• What are the odds that the mayor will say absolutely nothing about Louisiana’s statehood bicentennial this year the way he did with the 200th anniversary of the 1811 slave revolt, the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in U.S. history, last year?
• How many more years will it be before Eastern New Orleans gets some of those “purty” sound walls on the I-10 like you find in Jefferson Parish?
• Instead of paying independent contractors to do repairs on the city’s antiquated water system, why won’t the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board put its own engineers and technicians to work on these problems since they are getting paid hefty sums of overtime cash to be available for after-hours emergencies anyway?
• Doesn’t the fact that the city’s Blacker and poorer neighborhoods get the short end of the stick when it comes to police protection, infrastructure improvements and other city services sound an awful lot like “taxation without representation” and “unequal protection under the law”?
• Why do some murders appear to get city officials more riled up than others?
• Why are so few elected officials in this city willing to admit that better educational and economic opportunities for low-income families would lead to less crime and violence across the city and that the city as a whole is reaping what it has sown in the past with a sober mind?
• Aren’t tax-paying New Orleans residents entitled to see local elected and appointed officials working out their differences in public meetings rather than doing so behind closed doors and subsequently putting on a good show for those who attend public meetings?
• If stricter gun-control laws and stiffer penalties are unacceptable in mainstream America, why are these laws being touted as a solution to violent crime in mostly Black New Orleans?
• Which is harder for the Landrieu administration, keeping its tentacles out of every board and commission decision that falls under city government or making it look like it is not feverishly trying to call all of the shots from behind the scenes?
• Why can’t the mayor and other local elected officials appoint qualified, independent-thinking individuals to serve on the city’s various boards and commissions and trust them to make fair, clear-minded decisions that benefit most of the city’s residents and not just those who fill these elected officials’ campaign chests with dinero?
• With 20 murders in the first 26 days of 2012, including a homicide in Lakeview in broad daylight and a carjacking that turned deadly in Algiers Point, is anyone out there confident in the NOPD’s ability to “protect and serve” law-abiding residents?
• How close are we to returning to the days of the Wild, Wild West where everybody had a gun and it was every man, woman and child for himself?
• With so many lackluster performances from local elected officials and unfair decisions regarding limited public resources, why are there so few voter registration drives in New Orleans these days?
• With 700 cops assigned to the French Quarter to keep tourists safe over the BCS championship weekend, where were New Orleans’ finest when a Crimson Tide fan was having his way with an LSU freshman in a Bourbon Street hamburger joint?
• How many of its bigwigs is the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board willing to terminate or force to take a pay cut in order to free up additional funds to pay for the complete overhaul of the city’s antiquated water system the agency says is needed?
• How many of its former executives is the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board allowing to collect retirement income while also being compensated as a consultant to the agency as has been alleged?
• What is up with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her beef with President Barack Obama?
• How many of us who complain about the lack of good films about Black people still haven’t gone to the movies to see Red Tails, a big-screen tribute to World War II’s famed Tuskegee Airmen?
• What are you doing to bring Black history to life this February and every day of the year for your children and grandchildren?
This article was originally published in the January 30, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
