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The Seven Per Cent Solution
I'll admit I felt kind of cowardly, on the battlefield, in my living room, doing nothing. The day after I heard six or eight small caliber gunshots pierce the silence of my quiet Rocheblave neighborhood the new head cop and the new mayor admonished all of us to get involved in reporting criminal activity. The murder rate is spiking again, it's August, the month of greatest desperation.
Fuck it, I thought, supine on the couch catching up on unread New Yorkers which have laid on the floor unattended while I have read light fiction over the last month or two. I was reading about the ex-Dallas mayor, Democrat Ron Kirk, running for the Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican, Phil Graham. Anyhow, the gunshots had the feel of the air murderer, angst released skyward. Also, I don't have a phone, let someone else report it. The boys and girls at the NOPD internal affairs office are as close as I am to it. Let them report it. Is there a dead body on the corner, I wonder?
Ron Kirk has the plain speaking ability to sum things up--his success, he says, is reliant on whether or not the white voters of Texas will vote for a black man. And then he has to be the careful, calculating politician, glad-handing West Coast liberals and the most recent Democratic President without actually appearing to be of that ilk. That is a difficult position. His election to the Senate by the people of a state that worship that lame brain in the White House is essential to the Balance.
Today I watched four youths on bicycles steal a tiny kid's bicycle from my neighbor's yard, while Watchdog barked her head off. Poor Watchdog. She must think, what's the use? I do my job, nobody does nothing. Whiteboy just watches. I tried like hell last month to save him his extension ladder but he doesn't respond to my warnings, nobody does. I'm just a barking dog in the city that care forgot.
To round out a month in which two preachers got shot dead, a woman is brought home from church to a neighborhood she had lamented to her friend, was going to hell. She was embarrassed by the gangs of youth who congregated near her corner and expressed this to her church friend. Seconds after they passed a group of boys in the street, a shot rang out, the rear window of the van exploded, and the woman slumped over dead from the bullet in the back of her head. A sixteen year old boy had mistaken the van for that of an enemy.
Another sixteen year old boy, last known address the 1400 block of Rocheblave, is wanted in last month's shooting of the eleven year old girl in Eastern New Orleans.
Murder is up seven per cent for the month. Later, say a month from now, when there are only 22 murders instead of 30, they will bounce off that figure to show that crime is down, rest easy.
Last week a man in Eastern New Orleans witnessed from the balcony of his apartment another man stealing his car down below. From up on the balcony he shot and killed the man. Public sentiment, on talk radio, and around the water coolers, was adamantly in favor of this death penalty for the car thief. People are so fed up and scared they are now condoning the killing of unarmed men. With my co-workers I argued against this particular death penalty, but I have a very good feel for the context from which sprouts this violent reaction to the overall crime in our city, and more sympathy for the shooter than I have for the victim. The shooter, a grown man with children, has very likely been exposed to unspeakable crime in his lifetime here. If you live in this small city, and your head is not buried deep in the sand, it is hard to express how palpable the threat of violence can be, even as we dance in the streets. The shooter's justification in the paper that he was worried about the safety of his family, as words, factored against our common sense, and the awareness of proximity of shooter to unarmed car thief, do not ring true. But in the balance, in this city, how can we doubt a man who says he is worried about the safety of his family.
I've been thinking about the words of that stoic, Epictetus, and how his thoughts might relate to any of this or perhaps even provide a bit of consolation. He seems to differ from the "bell tolls for thee, no man is an island" school, by suggesting that we not sweat that which we have no control over. Why let that which has nothing to do with you, concern you? he seems to say. I guess it's the idea that if you can't change a thing, why even think about it? And that's, I think, why I can't get over this inner city murder and mayhem as a theme. Because we don't really, I mean really, think it is something we could not change if we chose to change it, do we? Slim?