Gentilly Girl- a part of the 99%

January 10, 2007

Silence Is Violence

Filed under: Civic Blogging,Crime,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 8:08 pm

Silence Is Violence is now up and running. There are postings here, and feedback, on the efforts of the folks of New Orleans to bring about a major decrease of the crime level in the city.

Enough is ENOUGH! 

January 8, 2007

A Few Recommendations About Crime

Filed under: Civic Blogging,Crime,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 7:44 pm

I will be posting odd bits and pieces concerning crime here in NOLA. Some will be stats, others will be protective measures. I have two for today:

1) NOLA Dishu has some updated crime maps that will help with focusing on what is going down where.

2) Taser International announced a smaller personal Taser to be released  in April. Fits in a purse or a pocket, is less powerful than the cop version, and it will stop an assailant for about 30 seconds. (enough time for me to break out a can of whoop-ass on him.) Price should be $300 plus and activation/registration fee.

BTW- If you are carrying a cell that is not a 504 number, you may not be able to use it to call 911 in the city. Check with your service provider. (Mine’s a Cali number, but that’s in case we have to evacuate and the local towers go down.)

January 6, 2007

Enough is Fucking ENOUGH!

Filed under: Civic Blogging,Crime,Event,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 9:55 pm

6 people killed in 24 hours?

One a possible domestic quarrel, 4 the usual gang retaliation crap, and the other seems to be a forced entry.


Curtsey to Loki.

Update- Here’s the link to NOLA Against Crime

December 30, 2006

Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss

Filed under: Civic Blogging,New Orleans — Tags: , — Morwen Madrigal @ 3:12 am

Hmmm… some of my friends are feeling the pain of the New Orleans Rebuilding Bull-shit game. Yes, I am too, but… I’m too steeped in this place to fucking give up. I can’t give up. This city means too much to me and my beliefs.

I’m not going to link these things out of a sense of propriety. I don’t wish to mix other voices with what I want to state tonight. I want to tell you the truth from where I fucking stand.

In three months we will be back in our home: three rentals will open up for those who want to come home. That’s all we can do from where we stand. My helping with the rebuilding of the city takes a backspace from that single fact. I helped create one of the most powerful associations of homeowners and the city, and even that machine cannot beat our local, State, and Federal fucks when it comes to reparations for the people endangered or killed by the Federal Flood of New Orleans. We are fucking screwed.

There is a Social Contract in this country (Yes, I have harped on this, but I must focus again on the topic.), and it’s being violated to the Nth Degree. We give, we cooperate, we care, or maybe it’s the filthy Christian/bigoted shit that is interfereing with that message? That there is no “milk of Human kindness” left? I don’t think so, just as I believe that there are Americans that believe in the concept of America minus the Semite religious shit. (That’s right cross-wearing assholes… the Priestess of Ashera comes back again.)
I don’t believe that the above is true. I can’t: I was ordained years ago and my sole purpose was to protect and give aid. That’s where my soul lies. This city is the only place I wish to be. My goal in this was to be a Teacher and Healer, and god-damn it… I have to play Warrior again. (didn’t want to go there…)

We have to take control of New Orleans. We need to have ownership of our own lives and just fuck those who would want to rule us.

The Federal Government fucked all of us. They cheeped out the levees, probably for contracts for their corporate butt-buddies or their god-damned illegal wars. They laid our homeland to waste for the fucking Yuppie lifestyle shit, for the damned “poor” fuckin’ Midwestern farmers that haul a profit from their crops and still stick it to the government for farm subsidies. For oil and gas companies that carve up our natural protections for their fucking shareholder’s gains.

Can you see where this is going?

The Federal monies must come to us directly, no State, no fucking city council or Mayor. We’ll fix it, not the damn corporations. (Betts and I are already doing it.)

Sinn Fein!

December 28, 2006

What Are Our Priorities as Citizens?

Filed under: Civic Blogging — Tags: — Morwen Madrigal @ 6:43 am

Loki over at Humid City brings up a Bill Moyers’ essay that in many ways sums up my philosophy about living in a modern 21st Century world. It includes my Spiritual beliefs. This is what the fuck I see, and it don’t take a college education to put it all together. (It just takes being Human.)

Many in this country really need a dose of Radical Faerism or the Teachings of the Lady. Maybe they just need to actually read the words of the Christ. Maybe some of them should have lived the life of a Hippie.

That Freakin’ “Email From Dakota”

Filed under: Civic Blogging,New Orleans,Witch Stuff — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 2:23 am

Loki over at Humid City brought this thing up again. I’ve seen this tripe before and ignored it. It’s just fucking propaganda of a (hopefully) dying segment of our polyglot culture. The only reason I’m bringing this up here is that we are going to be deluged by this kind of shit in the next two years. This is my time to blast this shit out.

We HAVE a Social Contract in this country. There are limitations upon our personal actions, but there are the benefits that come from communal action. (Yes, I commit victim-less crimes everyday and know the cost. I also commit crimes of kindness and mercy. Yes… I do understand what could happen to me for these actions, but WTF? Sometimes one has to push the envelope of the Contract to continue the evolution of Society.)

The Social Right in this country utilize the Contract constantly to enrich themselves and their congenitally-damaged offspring each and every day whilst condemning said Contract. This I do know as I had previously married into a clan of these fucks back in the ’90s. (It was nine years of Hell listening to the Patriarchs espouse their views and seeing the “mind-fuck 20″ games they played on people.) They were bigots and liars… cheats, and they claimed to be a part of the “Natural Aristocracy”. I ran as quickly as I could home to try to heal the damage to my psyche.

Those people are the same ilk as those who hate our city. They have this Puritan cross-wearing belief that only they deserve to live in North America, even while sucking the Federal teat. They steal from each and everyone of us and believe that is Spiritually ordained. They hate colored people, just as they abhor folks enjoying their own lives. They can’t stand the fact that there are people who DO enjoy living. (They don’t.) That’s one of the facets of the wonder of New Orleans… we actually get along and enjoy living.

The mean-spirited grinches are all about personal gain, but they haven’t, or can’t, experience the joy of just being alive with other folks. This is why they see us as having committed crimes. People down here don’t accept that Judeo-Xtian b/s and the suffering shit. We enjoy living… I mean, WTF else is there in life? (My basic Canon of Belief.)

What we have here in New Orleans is a miracle. Defend Her as best you can. I will.

December 22, 2006

FWD- “The Blog Before Christmas”

Filed under: Aside,Civic Blogging,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 6:47 am

Loki of Humid City fame wrote up a great little poem “The Blog Before Christmas”. “Tis a must read!

Happy Yule!

November 19, 2006

Righting Old Wrongs…

Filed under: Civic Blogging,New Orleans,Progressive News — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 6:57 am

The other day the T-P had a little article about mis-understanding Politics 101 here in the city. One of the developers of the Fallstaff property on Gravier St. remarked about the failure of Jazzland. Pissed off a supe or two, so what? The key thing was that he believed that we should “get people into rentals” Excuse me?
“Using the HOME money to help owners work on their houses, the Falstaff developers said, would not produce any of the new rental units the city needs and would not leverage the federal money to produce the greatest return.”

I freakin’ beg to differ Mr. Suit Man. The greatest return on the Federal monies sent as part of the Reparations due to the city’s people is best served by maintaining and creating home-ownership. A little slice of the American Dream, ‘eh?

HUD is tearing down the Projects… what the Hell can those folks afford in the near, or could be, the long-term Future? They will be paying tribute to yet another developer and their overlords. No Freedom, no freakin’ way out of the hole. Let’s just return to the pre-Flood days, ‘eh?

Screw that path… not going to play the same old game down here again. No, ya’s ain’t gonna build lots of apartment complexes in the “Sliver By The River” to house the poor that will become your indentured servants for the service industry and your damned profit margins. We don’t want your ugly complexes (read: projects) in the city. You will just suck rent, along with other things, let those things decay, find a way to bail out with the $$$, and then where do the little folks stand then?

I can tell you some of what’s going on. From the “Nation” April, ’06:

“The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America’s most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago. Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina–a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious–most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices. The city’s complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly’s red-brick normalcy–or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward–have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures–blacks running amok, incapable of honest self-government–that were evoked by the murderous White League when it plotted against Reconstruction in New Orleans in the 1870s. Indeed, some civil rights veterans fear that the 1874 Battle of Canal Street, a bloody League-organized insurrection against a Republican administration elected by black suffrage, is being refought–perhaps without pikes and guns, but with the same fundamental aim of dispossessing black New Orleans of economic and political power. Certainly, a sweeping transformation of the racial balance-of-power within the city has been on some people’s agenda for a long time.”

How about “The New Orleans Agenda” from last February’s S.F. Bayview? (If I excerpt it, I’ll have to copy and paste the entire essay. Just read it.)

“Oh! But the Feds are only required to return us to pre-Katrina situations.” Just kiss my tush jerks. The levees weren’t all of the problem. This has been a systemic assault upon the people of New Orleans for many, many decades. The failures of the levees could easily be seen as part of a “plan”. WE ARE OWED REPARATIONS! We should use them to bring all of New Orleans back on a more equitable footing. (Shit! That Neo-con/Bigot fault just shifted! Did ya’s feel that?) Neighborhood ownership and co-partners in the developement of said neighborhoods. (Damn! That fault shook again!) Good Public schools instead of the Parochial and Charter schools? (I think that last shaking was Rigor Mortis setting in. I’m freakin’ groovin’ to the movin’.)

The wrongs from the Past can be corrected within the rebuilding of the city. Many of us are seen as the oppressors from the poor’s side, but we aren’t: all of us are heirs to the bullshit bigotry of the Past. This time all of the tribes of New Orleans can hold hands and create the New Orleans that should have been: a place that is a collection of slices from much of Humanity’s experiences and have them mesh together into a semi-coherent whole. To create a new New Orleans: where the bigotry of the Past is laid to rest, and we all can stand up and state, “I own a piece of this home-place”, both soulfully and materially.

Think of it: What the Hell is the worth of the city and the vibes without all of us: Creole, Cajun, black, white, Asian, etc. living together? How did the music begin? Blacks and Creoles mainly, and then other elements flowed in. Our cuisine? Babes, I defy you to produce a more thourough fusion in the culture of foods. The City’s flavor? It took, and takes, all of us who love Her, all of us that just said, “New Orleans owns me… I can’t leave.”.

There’s a thing called the “Spirit of Place” or Genius Loci… all of us who love this place belong to it. It moves within the soul. It’s called belonging, and we should be beholding to It’s spirit. Let’s now create a true “Shining City Upon a Hill“.

I’m game: (I am a part of almost every culture in the city. I wish my relatives to be happy and contented). Where Yat?

Comic Relief 2006… WooHoo!!!

Tonight we watched Comic Relief 2006, a benefit for New Orleans. It was wonderful, and the local insights offered through the broadcast were definitely on target. They also pulled in $15M in donations. This is a good thing.
This, combined with the results of the last election, shows that folks do care about America’s Jewel. Americans do care about America, and honeys… we are more American than most. We have the history and the sacrifices for a nation’s growth through the many decades that the U.S. has been around. Culturally, only the Fundies and Disney-types DON’T like New Orleans.

So, give a hand to Comic Relief, HBO, and TBS (not that I watched their broadcast… you can’t say “fuck” on TBS) for their efforts on behalf of the people of New Orleans.

And… it’s time for all of the NOLA Blogosphere to start the poop-storm again about the situation down here along the Coast. It’s time to play the heart-a-chordian again.

November 17, 2006

Wet Bank Guide: “Ship of Fools”

Filed under: Civic Blogging,Katrina,Levees,New Orleans — Tags: , , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 5:13 pm

This is a must read from my friend Mark over at the Wet Bank Guide. Very well-done piece, and yes I wish I’d written it.
“I have come home, rejecting Robert Hunter’s caution, and boarded the ship of fools. I did so because I think this the sanest place in America, one of the few where there is some balance between the demands of Moloch and the need to be human, both as an individual and as a part of a true community. The real ship of fools is the rest of the country, drifting into cultural civil war and an economic death spiral of greed. As I’ve said before, if we can’t save New Orleans, then I have little hope for saving America, and I’d just assume spend the twilight years of America here, among friends.”

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