Enough!
When Helen Hill was murdered, people put up signs along her street in the Bywater that said ENOUGH.
Those signs are back up again as New Orleans started the year with three murders on its first brand new day. As ugly as every one of those murders were, they pale in comparison to 2-year-old Ja’Shawn Powell being killed by his father because he was forced to to pay child support.
Yes, Danny Platt was a disturbed man and this is an isolated yet horrific incident that is possibly not related to the fact people are killing people here on a daily basis, but the toll this all takes on the city’s soul is too much.
On Friday, the city is joining together to march in a vigil for Ja’Shawn and against violence. The organization Silence is Violence that came together after Hill was shot has asked everyone to wear red this Friday to protest the crime in this city.
For so long, we have quietly accepted that crime is a part of living in paradise. There is a taciturn understanding that black on black crime seldom spills over into “our” lives. But whether people as far away from our lives as those gunned down in Mumbai or as close as a little two-year-old chubby cheeked black boy is getting his throat cut in New Orleans, it’s hard to believe guns and insanity aren’t spilling very messily into all of our lives.
So ENOUGH.