Mogadishu on the Bayou

But Rod--You can probably find a quaint Craftsman style house for a song in New Orleans... Gentrify, Rod, gentrify!!!

"...can't be fixed by cutting more checks, building more community centers, electing more Democrats, etc." I suppose electing more Republicans would help though, huh?

It goes back to the socio-psycho trauma of slavery, which destroyed families and individuals, and then, more controversially, to the welfare programs in post-WWII America, in which single-family households were favored; gov't policy didn't reward two-parent homes. Hence, kids raised with just one parent, which is unhealthy. I remember one of my soc profs in college saying that he has a card-carrying liberal democrat, but all social ills could be traced back to the breakdown of the family. So that's a description. Prescription? Gotta get tough on crime, gotta set policies that reward families, people (Christians like you and I) gotta get involved teaching parenting classes, helping folks in our communities with simple odds and ends, tutoring kids, etc. We need an investment of volunteer man- and womanpower, not another federal program.

There is a degree of dysfunctionality present here that is downright Hobbesian Yes, and it can best be handled with a Hobbesian solution. Leviathan needs to start cracking some heads.

Broken glass theory. NOLA was a mess before that hurricane hit, and that's something for which W ain't at fault.

Hmmm. The Louisiana Recovery Authority puts the Orleans Parish population at 200,665, and the population within the city limits of New Orleans itself estimated to be be as low as 191,000 (as of February 2007), not counting the large number of reconstruction workers currently residing in the city. There were 161 NOLA homicides in 2006, and at the current pace there will be well over 200 in 2007 (see last week's Economist). 400 homicides in those two years would be the proportional equivalent to 8,500 car bomb deaths within the city limits of Baghdad (~ 4.5 million) in the same period. Which is several thousand more car bomb deaths than have, er, actually happened. Will Rod have the courage to say in print in the DMN that NOLA is in fact, in a state of civil war?

Venn There were 5,106 homicides in Baghdad in just July and August last year. There are routinely more than 100 per week there. NOLA isn't even close. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA071FFC3A550C728EDDA00894DE404482

GIITV I don't see any help coming from Government, which exists to keep rich people rich. Yeah, partly. But it also exists to keep poor people from killing and robbing rich people and each other. It exists to mitigate the whole "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" part so that some people can get rich. If the State doesn't use force every now and again, its subjects will. Hobbes was right about us.

Perhaps: Bring the troops home. Put them on patrol in high-crime areas and on the border. If we don't have reasonably safe neighborhoods at home, perhaps we shouldn't be trying to bring law and order abroad.

Major: Let us say we do as you suggest regarding the troops. How would you curb the corruption in Louisiana government? First, let us talk about Gov. Kathleen Blanco. What has she done to remove corruption? Nothing! Did you know almost the day before Hurricane Katrina hit members of the New Orleans levee board where indicted in Baton Rouge because they used the money from that program like their own ATM. What about Mayor Nagin? When the s*** hit the fan he folded like a cheap suit. This proved he is no Rudy Guiliani. Do you know what he has done to rid New Orleans of corruption? I do not know either. Last but no least, there is Congressman William Jefferson who managed to get reelected. Even after the Feds recovered $90,000 grand from his freezer. In short, troops may provide some solution but until you rid Louisiana of this Laissez faire attitude towards political corruption, it will not change didly.

Of course, I've always been more of a Rousseau-ian than a Hobbesian thinker. Hobbes believed life before Leviathan was a horrific thing, because he was looking at the world around him - a world that had been "civilized" for 3000 years. Rousseau believed that life wias idyllic before someone put up fences and began guarding property with weapons. When the food, the clothes and the shelter is free for the taking, what is there to protect?

"What may save a lot of N.O. kids is that they NO LONGER LIVE THERE. They may be in Houston, Georgia, wherever, but they are in a less dysfunctional place, where they have better guidance and modeling." Better guidance and modeling from whom? MTV is the same in Houston as in N.O. If the people don't change, then the environment changes to match the people.

GIITV True. And in that respect it is failing miserably. That's why they need to start cracking some heads. See, I've got a theme going here. Seriously though, I am a Hobbesian thinker, as you are a Rousseau-ian. The funny thing is that you can boil down the optimistic and pessimistic views of human nature to Hobbes and Rousseau. Everyone else is commentary.

"Ordinary people" ...you mean, you and me? Arm, practice, and if Mogadishu comes to you, do what you must do. You and I are caught between a growing and violent anti-society and milksop, pc-whipped governments that cannot or will not supress it. (Are your ears burning, jefecito ?) Our Levethian is helplessly flopping around on the beach. My ,but it's an interesting time to be an American.

Umm, I'm a little confused, Armchair Pessimist. So if my ears are burning, you were talking about me. So am I the "milksop, pc-whipped governments that cannot or will not supress it"? I'm a sovereign? Or did you mean I'm just a milksop and PC whipped? Believing that everyone carries the image of God is politically correct? Really? Or are you saying I'm a "milksop" because I'm not willing to get a gun and prepare for the barbarians at the gate? If so, I'm fine not sharing a worldview where your strategy is a virtue.

Giittv wrote above, with bold added by me: What the community in NOLA needs (and I'm not talking out of my ass here, 22 of my family members lost the material goods they couldn't carry out with them in Katrina) is leadership from the bottom up. They need a person or people to whom those struggling to make it can look up. People who know the area, know the struggles the working poor and the unemployed face down there who can inspire more than the "me-firstism" the the government/business alliance engenders. In short, what they need is a martyr. I'm serious, and at the risk of hyperbole, deadly serious. Such a category of person is present in nearly every community, and as individuals they epitomize the ethical value of treating others not just with respect, but with the notion that they, too, deserve to live there in peace. So, hypotheticating from the story of the murdered boy, what is needed is a neighbor of that mother with the gun getting in the mother's face and telling her that not only is she wrong, but that she is teaching her son evil. A possible consequence of that action is getting shot by the mother. It all must be possible, it all must happen. That is the essence of bottom-up in this ethical context. Naturally, I do not hope that martyrs are made. I would hope that people will respond constructively to that sort of leadership, but the reality is that there is an entire set of generations who consider violence a valid response to nearly any situation. It will take more than symbolic leadership to negate that.

Apology accepted, Armchair Pessimist. Although I suspect you'd still find me a "menace," and I'm still confused. What did I write that made me sound lukewarm? That I saw all people, even defendants, as bearers of the image of God? I said these cases are hard to listen to, and I needed prayer. Pretend I'm a judge. Should a judge find these cases anything but tragic? A judge is supposed to dispassionately apply the law. Otherwise, he or she would be an activist judge. I don't understand how prayer or seeing "these people" as children of God gets in the way of protecting the public (although technically, the representative of the people is the prosecutor, not the judge).