Laissez les bon temps… etc…

Today is Mardi Gras, the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.

When we think about Mardi Gras, we often think about Rio – and New Orleans. One of the more optimistic blog posts I found about the “reconstruction” of New Orleans (which is the hook for most of the media stories about this year’s Mardis Gras) worried that there might be:

a terrible, devastating glimpse of a possible conclusion to the New Orleans story.

As Nicole Bell wrote:

Mardi Gras is almost upon us. It is impossible to think of Mardi Gras without thinking of New Orleans, still devastated by Katrina. But while the media gleefully talks about which actors are participating, many Ninth Ward residents aren’t as jubilant, having lived a Lenten-like deprivation for almost two years.

To adapt the title of her post, for whom is today a Fat Tuesday? Incompetent corporates dodgily awarded reconstruction contracts for New Orleans. More on that, and the state of the city’s deconstruction, at the Centre for Public Integrity’s Katrina Watch. A particularly egregious example of FEMA’s priorities is highlighted at the Women of Color Blog.

Barbara O’Brien takes stock:

But a combination of greed, corruption, and knee-jerk anti-government ideology instead is creating a second disaster, deeper and more intractable than the devastation of Katrina. That disaster has been unfolding for months, and continues to unfold right now. Billions of taxpayer dollars are disappearing into a black hole of corruption. Former residents — families, children — are scattered and apparently expected to fend for themselves. And the underground labor pool the contractors are exploiting may be tomorrow’s wretchedly poor residents of New Orleans, clinging to subsistence at the edges of a rich nation.

While the official narrative focuses on crime as the source of Nola’s current problems, Heather Wokusch looks at the appallingly neglected mental health issues in the city, and Robin Templeman hones in on the causes of crime.

On January 11th, 5,000 New Orleanians picketed City Hall demanding that local leaders find answers to the crime crisis. The tipping point for the rally was the killing of a white film maker, Helen Hill, in the Faubourg Marigny district, a hot spot for nightlight that sits adjacent to the French Quarter. Hill was the first white victim in the murder wave. Most of the killings have involved African American youth, slaying one another.

Ultimately, says Ursula Price, the conditions in which New Orleans’ children are living is the root of the crime problem. “I’d like to see just one investigation of a murder that looked at what’s going on in the lives of the people involved.”

The conditions are stark. Six graders are on waiting lists to get into public school. Public housing, though most units were undamaged by the storm, remains boarded up. There is no public mental health care in a city whose residents disproportionately suffer from depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Much of the city’s infrastructure remains crippled; many of its streets are still piled with debris, burnt out cars and power lines. Graffiti still covers many abandoned buildings. In some neighborhoods the writing is still on the walls: “You loot. We shoot.”

Not counting state and federal funds, law enforcement currently represents one-third of New Orleans’ city budget. “We’re banking against our children,” says Reverend Sekou Osagyefo, “because of the kinds of investments we’re making in arresting and incarcerating them, instead of rebuilding their communities.”

Reading all that (and a lot more stuff I looked at while researching this post) does make me feel thoroughly Lenten.

So here’s some vid of the 1941 New Orleans Mardi Gras parade. Enjoy. But contemplate.