Wet Bank Guide

. . . The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed . . .
-- from The Fire Sermon, from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland

What will it mean to the future of the city if the senseless murder of Helen Hill is the last straw? The level of despair is the worst I've heard since the bleak fall of '05, when it seemed the city was drowned to death. People are beginning to murmur that they have had enough, that they will follow Paul Gailiunas and go. It will be painfully ironic if the placards posted through Central City calling people to stand up against crime to save their city become instead signposts on the way to somewhere else.

Even from my cozy corner of the Triangle of Hope in Mid-City, the neighborhood I began referring to only partially in jest as the Green Zone, a gathering of friends was marked by the tension. I had hoped Bart and Xy would join us; they hard RSVP'd. Given their connection to Paul and Helen, I was not surprised when they did not come. One person who did come came without his wife, pleading too much stress on her part. She called right after his brief drop-by, worried about where he was "with all the bullets flying out there." At nights end, one person fled the porch suddenly when I mentioned "the couple in the Marigny" and did not return.

I do feel safe even as property crime seems to be on the upswing in Mid-City. I look at the police maps, and "persons crimes" are notably absent from our area. Still, my daughter is in the Bywater every day at NOCCA, and the guards at the entrance and high fences: are they enough? Its one thing to risk my neck on principle, but another that she have to risk hers.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Kimberly has said it best by stealing the silly phrase of 2001: If you leave, the terrorists win. Here, that trite bit of propaganda has true meaning. The shooters are lost to humanity, have lost their humanity, become precisely what Anthony Burgess meant by a clockwork orange: a souless, clockwork person; something that seems bright and full of the juice of life but is in fact a sham of a human being; a golum.

Regardless of one's views on religion and spirit, it is indisputable that evil moves in the world even if it is only a diseased and dysfunctional aspect of humanity. It is moving through our city, cruising slowly through the drug-riddled neighborhoods with a .40 caliber automatic in its pocket. To leave now would be a mistake at great as Neville Chamberlain's. It will not mean peace for our time, but instead consign those who remain to a downward spiral into the unimaginable and render everything we have done for the city by coming home worthless.

I am no more ready to give up hope now than I was a year and a half ago. Confronting the crime problem is no less daunting than contemplating how to rebuild a city more damaged than anything seen since World War II. All that is required for evil-- and in the city's case entropy--to triumph is that good men and women do nothing, as thefamous misquote of Edmund Burke runs. Just as apt is an actual quote on the issue of American independence also from Mr. Burke:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one...

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// posted by Mark Folse @ 10:46 PM 12 comments