{"id":11401,"date":"2011-03-02T08:35:49","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T13:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/?p=11401"},"modified":"2011-03-02T08:38:50","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T13:38:50","slug":"the-bard-of-new-orleans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/?p=11401","title":{"rendered":"The Bard of New Orleans"},"content":{"rendered":"

If ever the city needed a poet who speaks for its soul, New Orleans needs one and here is one of NOLA’s finest<\/a> – a posting to his Facebook page:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Murder in New Orleans<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
by\u00a0Chuck Perkins<\/a> on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 8:49pm<\/div>\n
\n

The phrase, \u201ca lot of my friends are dead or in jail\u201d, no longer evokes shock or horror\u201d, its meaning has become tamed. Too many mentions in movies and songs; too much spotlight on the evening news. The masses have become desensitize; they\u00a0quickly forget\u00a0that\u00a0human brains have been splattered on the fa\u00e7ades of corner grocery stores\u00a0and\u00a0that red\u00a0blood has stained\u00a0sidewalks and street corners\u00a0with the color of war? Even this sounds trite. Why beat a dead horse?<\/p>\n

In one of my favorite Toni Morrison novels, I was forced to consider the generational implications of murder. One of the characters made a point about family blood lines. She explained that when our blood lines are carried forward, up to\u00a0six future\u00a0generations, our progeny will carry traces of our features and mannerisms. We will be present in the way they\u00a0walk\u00a0or scratch their backs.\u00a0Subsequently, when you kill someone, you don\u2019t kill only them; you kill six generations of people.<\/p>\n

The men, women and children who are slaughtered everyday in our city are not numbers or statistics. They were not androids, or sub-human species either. They were human beings, mostly black, mostly male and mostly young, with the capacity to love, dream and imagine. Consider the tragedies that devoured them in this city\u2019s unforgiving cycle of violence. Multiply it by two or three would be children; now, advance it to the sixth power. Pronounce their names; acknowledge the weight of their existence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If ever the city needed a poet who speaks for its soul, New Orleans needs one and here is one of NOLA’s finest – a posting to his Facebook page: Murder in New Orleans by\u00a0Chuck Perkins on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 8:49pm The phrase, \u201ca lot of my friends are dead or in jail\u201d, no longer evokes shock or horror\u201d, its meaning has become tamed. Too many mentions in movies and songs; too much… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[346,347,348],"class_list":["post-11401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-chuck-perkins","tag-murder","tag-new-orleans-murder-rate"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-2XT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11401"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11405,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11401\/revisions\/11405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}