Wet Bank Guide

Today my wife called in a mix of panic and anger after witnessing two men arguing at the corner of St. Ferdinand and Chartres, one of them waving a gun around no more than 50 feet from the entrance to the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. She was on here way to drop off dinner to my daughter, who is a dancer at NOCCA.

According to my wife, who was at a stop sign just feet from the altercation, two older men were arguing and one threatened to shoot the other. The second suggested the first didn't have a gun. yelled. Challenged, fellow number one pulled out his gun and waved it around a bit. She didn't wait around to see if anyone was shot, but pulled quickly in to the school yard and told the security guards there. They told her to call 9-1-1 and went back into their cubicle. She she just called me in anger and went back to work. There were no bodies lying on the corner when she went back past.

This kind of altercation is disturbing enough, but what rattled me was my daughter's reaction when she go home tonight. Her friends thought that my wife had completely overreacted. "She must not be from a very big city," she reported was their response. To these kids, some of whom go to very hard schools in the inner city, this was no big deal; just another day in the City That Care Forgot.

There is something terribly wrong with their reaction. The reason the death toll in New Orleans rivals that of the casualty count in Iraq is because too many people just can not get themselves riled up. These kids, some of the best and brightest in New Orleans, think its perfectly normal for two men to get in an altercation on a corner and for one of them to quickly escalate to waving a gun around.

These weren't a couple of gang-bangers but a couple of older fellows according to my wife. It's just as well. If they were the age of the girls my daughter dance with, I'm sure someone would have died at that corner this afternoon. Its a dangerous city, and I am not surprised that some people would drop a gun in their pocket to walk their dog, but the casual way it escalated to a brandished gun, the disinterest of the guards who are there to protect the children in the school, and the callous unconcern of by daughter's fellow students all point to a profound dysfunction.

My daughter's friends are wrong. We're not innocents, even if my wife is a nice girl from North Dakota. About the time my daughter was born, we lived on 4th Street N.E. in Washington, D.C. just about the start of the crack wars. I prided myself on my city savvy, on the way I sat on my stoop and visited with my neighbors, making myself part of the neighborhood so they would keep an eye on me and mine while most of my yuppie neighbors fled quickly into their houses and locked their barred doors.

At that point in time, in the early 1990s, something had changed. People I once did not fear, petty criminals who would avoid you if you looked them in the eye as you passed and kept your wits about about, became animals who would shoot you first and then see what was in your pockets. At night, I could sit in my tiny back patio and hear gun battles. Police helicopters would circle the neighborhood at roof-top level, sweeping the area with their powerful search lights.

One night walking back form the neighborhood store, I watched a gang of pre-teens walking down the middle of the street. A police cruiser came up behind them and slowly rolled through the crowd, which broke into a chorus of N.W.A's "Fuck The Police". The cruiser just idled on and turned the corner. When two people died withing a block of our house, and an abduction/rape/murder began in the alley across the street, we fled to the Virginia suburbs.

Something in the city had gone terribly wrong. The last sparks of humanity were flickering out in people all around me, people with guns who were not afraid to use them or to die. The manageable Junko Pardner I could stare down had become Alex the Droogie of Clockwork Orange, an immoral golum with a gun. I could no longer excuse living in the city they were taking over like a plague of vermin, not with a wife and a small child.

What shocks me today is not that there are still killing fields in our cities, that children grow up pining for their first handgun. Not much has changed in the America that began to produce these kids over a decade ago, and what has changed has not been for the better, at least not in their lives. We imprison more people than any other industrialized nation, but do nothing at the root of the problem.

What shocks me today is the casual and callous attitude of my daughter's peers. The children who attend NOCCA with my daughter have no excuse. They are kids smart enough to make something of themselves through art and to make the grades in that enables them to split their days between traditional high school and NOCCA. Someone needs to take these children by the lapels, to take all of the children who are not past saving but believe its perfectly normal for people to menace each other with guns, and give them a good hard smack. When they get over that, they need an explanation as to why it is Not OK that people wave guns around in the street at the slightest provocation.

Its bad enough that we've let one set of children become predators in an urban jungle. We must not let our own children think that this is a normal way to live, or the jungle will prevail and there will be no safe place of retreat. Even if we all flee the animals, deprived of prey, will simply follow us. And for all of our fine rationalizations based on prejudice or economics or politics as to why things have turned out this way, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.


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