The Day After the New Orleans Mother's Day Shooting

I received an email on Monday (May 13) from BlogHer's News and Politics Editor Grace Hwang Lynch looking for people willing to write about the Mother's Day shooting. When I saw it, I was annoyed. No. I was angry in a way I couldn't understand. I figured that people not from here thought the incident was another "mass shooting story" like Newtown or Aurora, but I knew better.

I figured New Orleans would be all over the news for the wrong reasons again, CNN, ABC, NBC up in our faces aiming their cameras at our freakish dysfunction. I kept thinking, these people aren't here. They won't understand. They don't love us. Some of them will just watch like we're a train wreck, too. Oh, I hope they catch these guys, lock 'em up, and throw away the key.

Testy, I wrote to the editor:

Why does [your website] want to cover it? It's bangers shooting into crowds, which unfortunately is not that unusual down here now and not the kind of story [the website] has covered before. I'm not against the coverage. I'm just curious. Why now and what's the angle? It happened in my ward. I drove through the crowd about two hours before it happened.

Grace wrote back very graciously explaining her ideas on a possible angle. She thought that perhaps people would see a connection between this story and the gun violence/control debates that emerged after Newtown, the discussion that seems to have been shelved. She mentioned the 5-year-old who shot and killed his sister and the numbers of young people dying from gun violence around the country. She also said that perhaps the story was that the New Orleans shooting would not be perceived as the Newtown shooting had been.

Still on edge, I wrote back:

In the case of the Newtown shooting, gun violence got attention mainly because it was children who were shot in an otherwise "non-violent" middle-class area. The New Orleans shooting should not be perceived the same as Newtown unless it is proven that the person shooting was a lone gunman who is not connected to the circumstances behind our typical shootings down here. Usually, it's some impulse-control-deficient idiot who sees a rival from another gang and doesn't care that he has to shoot into a crowd to shoot that rival.

The kind of gun violence that goes on in New Orleans will not be solved by ID [background] checks. ID checks assume gun violence is far more simple than it is. I'd be shocked to learn the shooter in last night's incident bought his gun from a legitimate dealer. And yet, the kinds of solutions it would take to curb the violence in New Orleans are unlikely to ever be undertaken by legislators that can't even bring themselves to pass legislation as simple as ID checks.

I don't know what to say. I guess I'll wait to see what [another writer who offered to cover it] writes. I'm somewhere between numb and raving mad about this shooting. So, I'm having trouble seeing how a blog piece related to gun violence in general can even come close to approaching the depth needed to address the trouble we're having in New Orleans.

All I can say is that we've had these troubles long before the Newtown shooting. Gun violence in New Orleans is connected to poverty, the disproportionate number of black people being sent to prison, the criminalization of drug use, a lack of jobs, a dysfunctional education system, and other issues. Yesterday's shooting is not the same as the Newtown shooting and the only comparison that can be made is that somebody had a gun.

Look at how quickly the outrage over Newtown faded. If America can't force Congress to address gun violence in the wake of mostly little white children being shot, what hope is there for families suffering in a city like New Orleans?

Below are just a few of the [gun violence] stories I have either mentioned or [have] been aware of or [have] been connected to in the last year. I add them so that you or anyone else reading will know why I am so frustrated.

• Yesterday morning, Mother's Day, a big front page spread on our daily paper's front page of mothers who've lost children to gun violence, one of whom is a friend of mine. Her daughter was shot last year by someone who was after the girl's boyfriend.
• [At my on-again/off-again blog The Urban Mother's Book of Prayers] December 17, 2012: Stray bullet from shootout hits child in school bus, New Orleans.
• September 2012: Drive-by shooting through Midcity (stray bullets, very Wild West)
• [Affecting me more directly] August-October 1 of 2012: Cousin shot and paralyzed, neighbor shot and killed, friend's daughter shot and killed
• May 30, 2012: 9 shot at birthday party, New Orleans. Five-year-old dead.
• March 3, 2012: New Orleans mothers of gun violence victims featured on CNN.
• Beginning of last year: 47 shot in 12 days.

There was nothing wrong about the editor's query. She made a reasonable request, but the Mother's Day shooting had undone me. Years of worry and stress fell on me at once, it seemed. . . . Return to my BlogHer.com post.

Cracking Up at Stephon Marrying Anderson Cooper on SNL (Video)

Too hilarious to miss is the video above of Saturday Night Live character Stefon's marriage to Anderson Cooper. The skit marked the last time we'll see Bill Hader regularly doing his Stefon report on Weekend Update with Seth Myers. Saturday, May 18, was Hader's last show as a cast member.

Below is a 2011 clip from the David Letterman show in which Hader talks about how he came up with the Stefon character and how he could never keep a straight face when he did the Stefon segments.

Scandal Creator Shonda Rhimes Talks Olivia Pope and Judy Smith (Video)

In the video above, CNN's Jake Tapper interviews Shonda Rhimes, the creator of ABC's hit show Scandal and the long-running Grey's Anatomy. Rhimes talks about what drew her to Judy Smith's life. Smith is the real woman whose work as a crisis manager inspired Scandal.

Rhimes also discusses with Tapper that the show is the first show in 40 years to feature a black woman as the lead character. The other show ran in the late 60s and early 70s, Julia starring Diahann Carroll.

Rhimes grew up watching very little television. Her parents were in academia.  According to an interview with the New York Times, a competitive nature pushed her toward film school when she graduated from Dartmouth.

In this second interview, Rhimes talks about wielding power in Hollywood.



Tonight is Scandal's season finale, and I know Twitter will be atwitter discussing every detail. I'll be watching. Will you?

Small Child Running Near the Gunman in New Orleans Shooting Photo: The Toll of Gun Violence on Children (Video)

Look at this picture. Does that look like a small child running alone from the shooter? So young, so small, and already he's had to learn to escape a bullet.

The man in the photo aims at the scattering crowd attending the New Orleans Mother's Day Second Line Parade. Police are currently searching for the suspect, allegedly Akein Scott. But did you notice that small child?

Yesterday, I didn't write much about the mass shooting in New Orleans on Mother's Day. Despite my having started the Urban Mother's Book of Prayers years ago, I had little to say in public. I was somewhere between numb and raving mad, I wrote to someone in email.

We've had so many shootings here, far too many during which a gunman decides to shoot into a crowd or have a shootout on a busy street. We had at least three incidents of innocent bystanders wounded or killed by stray bullets during shootouts last year.

The most heart-wrenching case was that of 5-year-old Briana Allen shot to death at a birthday party. The case so disturbed one of our seasoned photographers that he wrote an eloquent essay about seeing her little body. And Mayor Landrieu mentioned Briana, among others, yesterday when he addressed the city about the Mother's Day mass shooting.

Multiple reports and documentaries have focused on the toll gun violence is taking on New Orleans, especially on our children. Yesterday, I posted the trailer for Shellshocked, one such film.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw a video at NOLA.com of children being interviewed at school about the shooting. All who spoke were terrified, unable to sleep well.

And this morning NOLA.com reports that one of the 10-year-old victims grazed by a bullet at the Mother's Day Shooting is the cousin of little Briana Allen. Ka'Nard Allen was the birthday boy that fateful day when Briana was killed. He was grazed that day, too, at his birthday party. So, with the Mother's Day shooting, he's a victim of gunfire again. He doesn't want to talk about any of this, says the article. You can see how this violence is too much for us all, especially children. See the video below. In it one child questions why anyone has a gun.

Shellshocked, a documentary on New Orleans Gun Violence (Video)

Apropos posting given yesterday's shooting at the Mothers' Day second line parade in New Orleans. From the film's website.

New Orleans, Louisiana is the murder capital of the United States. For the last decade, statistics have shown murder rates four to six times higher than the national average. Eighty percent of the victims are black males, mostly in their teenage years. This is the city's greatest neglected crisis with profound implications for the issues of violence and crime most American cities face. New Orleans government, law enforcement, community leaders, and well-intentioned citizens cannot agree on a prognosis or a solution to this situation. Wherever a disagreement is escalating into violence, an execution is being planned, or a victim is taking his last breath, it is more than likely a youth is witnessing or carrying out these actions.

Shell Shocked attempts to bridge the gap of this disconnect by hearing the ideas, opinions, and testimonies from activists, community leaders, police, city officials, youth program directors, family and friends of victims, and the children who live in these violent circumstances. We are looking for positive solutions to an extremely negative situation.

At NOLA.com, three poems by children about New Orleans gun violence.

Crossposted at The Urban Mother's Book of Prayers.

Candice Glover Sings 'Somewhere' from West Side Story: Nails It (Video)

All I can say is watch Candice Glover, listen to her sing "Somewhere" from West Side Story. I'm going to iTunes for my copy.

Here are a few other renditions of this song. First and possibly most well-known is Barbra Streisand's performance, followed by Aretha Franklin's soulful jazz version, which far fewer people have heard. More recent is Josh Grobin and Charlotte Church's duet (the song was originally a duet), and then Lea Michelle and Idina Menzel version from Glee.



Aretha Franklin's soulful jazz version.



Josh and Charlotte.

Glee. ( Lea Michele and Idina Menzel)



Here are older versions. The duet from the 1961 movie is what made more people in American know the song because most folks did not get to Broadway to see the original cast.



Original Broadway cast's version.

The truth about sinkholes and Bayou Corne disaster, CBS News reports (Video)

Sinkholes fascinate and terrify me. They have for years, long before I heard about the story of the man whose bedroom was sucked into one in Florida in February. So, when I see a story about sinkholes on the news or online, I have to watch or read, and lately, if the report is about sinkholes in general, like the video posted above, I wait to see whether the reporter covers the mess we've got here in Louisiana right now at Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish.

While sinkholes generally are a natural phenomenon, the Bayou Corne sinkhole was caused by human error related to the extraction of brine by Texas Brine from the Napoleon Salt Dome's caverns. The company has agreed to pay settlements to residents who've lost or will lose their homes. It's possible, according to a Texas Brine engineer, the sinkhole may keep expanding for another year.

The Bayou Corne disaster also reminds me of another Louisiana incident related to salt domes, the Lake Peigneur drilling catastrophe of 1980. The Lake Peigneur disaster was the result of a Texaco oil drilling miscalculation near a salt dome. The video below explains what happened there.

Time for the good cry, another moment of healing

I don't know what overtook me today, but for the first time in maybe 30 years, I heard Aretha Franklin's "All the King's Horses," which I've posted above, and started crying. My first thought is that I needed to cry because I've been holding so much in over the last year (family deaths, health concerns, a variety of fears).

Once in my life I was known for crying often--sobbing because someone hurt my feelings or rejected me, weeping at sad movies, and sniffling over Hallmark commercials. I learned that I had to toughen up and stop that or nothing would ever get done. Plus many people that I have known think crying is a sign that the weepy one is a manipulator. Really, that was not the case when it came to me.

I know it was not the case because my mother used to say that people use the behavior that gets them the results they want, but no one ever gave me anything because I cried. I have not been the kind of woman that people rush to assist, and much of my crying after a certain age, I did alone because I didn't want a lecture from anyone telling me not to be so sensitive.

But, Lord, this old Aretha tune got to me.

I cannot lie, the song made me think of the unraveling of my marriage, even though I know divorce (a type of death) was the right thing for me. The song hurled me back to when I was a teen listening to it on my stereo, having no idea that someday in the future, the feelings in the song would be mine.

You never know how deep a wound is, even your own--sometimes especially not your own because stopping to investigate its depth would toss you into a pit of non-functioning. As the saying goes, "Don't pick at a scab," and so we learn not to contemplate the harder stuff of life: the pain and sorrow, the moments when we think perhaps life is meaningless and the silence that bounces back to us when we don't sense the presence of God or the Universe with us. Who wants to pick at a scab and watch new pus erupt?

Perhaps, as a person drawn to poetry, I can't help but think on such things. Perhaps it is part of my sometimes gloomy nature. I think now of Jericho Brown's opening lines of his poem "Again" from Please:

You are not as tired of the poem
As I am of the memory.
A returning toothache
On either side of the mouth.

The speaker of the poem is returning to a troubling childhood memory and is aware that others are weary with his worrying over the past.

Yes, some events mark us, and our thoughts return to them. However, we do not return to wallow in being wronged or in the guilt that we've wronged someone else, as someone seemed to suggest in a comment once on another post about divorce; we return to assess where we've been and where we're going and to try to make sense of our existence.

Ask anyone who's experienced a death or another deep loss, the brain returns and rehashes; it recirculates memories as the heart does blood, those memories that shape who we become. I think that while it's true we should not dwell too long with misery, it's equally true that if we ignore or fail to acknowledge that we still hear the echo of painful moments and wonder what they may have taught us or that we still sense sometimes the phantom of something that feels unresolved, then we run the risk of emotional clotting the same way we run the risk of getting blood clots if we ignore symptoms of physical circulation problems.

Healing takes for each person however long that it takes.

I didn't want to run from whatever it was I felt when I heard the song. I had to probe it at a deeper level, which is something that poetry also causes us to do, according to poet Julie Kane. And whoever wrote the "All the King's Horses" lyrics was also a poet (I think Aretha herself wrote the lyrics).

We sat on the wall of happiness
We sat on the wall of love
We sat on the wall of security
So high above

With his arms all around me
It was like a fairy tale
Two people so in love
Tell me how could it fail

The wall started shaking
I heard love cried out
Happiness is given away
Security is coming down

He fell, I fell
And all there is left to tell

Is all the king's horses
All the king's men
Couldn't put our two hearts
Together again


More lyrics: LyricsMode

And then, of course, there's the Queen of Soul singing. That had to make a difference.