looking for the peace time

in my mind i am picturing 5,000 people marching on city hall in protest of our crime problem. above the fray, i can see a white banner flying with the letters "sos" written in splattered red, like so much blood washing the new orleans' streets. in one week, more people were killed here than died in iraq. this is a war zone. i do not remember ever joining the army or signing up to fight and yet i have been on a 14 year long tour of duty and my god, but the things i have seen. there was a man i watched be beaten to death. the sixteen year old with his brains splattered all over frenchmen street and his pregnant sister bleeding in the car nearby. there were two guys that crashed into charity hospital as a result of gunshot wounds that i saw on my way to work one fine spring day. the boy shot in the leg. the little girl shot in the ankle. the kid blown of his motorcycle. and damn but if the list does not go on and on. after the storm, i stood looking at all the destruction and for the first time the city looked like the war zone it had so long been. there was an eerie quiet after the storm. no gunshots. no screaming mothers. i thought, maybe the peace will hold and we can go on without the war. then the drug dealers came back, lured by the prospect of hungry contractors with fast cash burning holes in their pockets. i don't remember when i heard my first gunshot after katrina, only that it startled me in a way i think no noise ever had or will again. the peace was broken. the war was back on and the names of victims started to grow. i don't know all of them. i don't know all of their faces. there have been so many. but i did know helen hill and wendy byrnes. i did know others. it seems that nothing changes here. people shoot and kill and if someone witnesses the murder, they are either intimidated(blown up vehicles and such) into silence or murdered. the latest casualties appear to be an elderly couple, shot to death in their lower ninth ward home in an apparent attempt to silence their nephew who was scheduled to testify in an upcoming trial. the wife was found in the bedroom clutching a knife and i can only imagine the fear and horror she must have felt, hearing her husband killed in the next room, knowing what was coming for her. and for what? for fucking what? all because her nephew was trying to do the right thing. we so rarely do the right thing here. gunshots? oh well, roll over and go back to sleep. drug dealers? what drug dealers? i didn't see anything. and if you do go to the police, nine times out of ten, they fuck it up anyway. so you want to do the right thing and testify? good luck. it might just get you or someone you love killed. that's how it goes down in new orleans. meanwhile our mayor is trying to remember if his first class trip to jamaica was paid by someone else and our city council has disintegrated into a damn day care center with bickering and back biting. riley...fucking riley never seems to take responsibility for anything. you know what guys? the ship is sinking. it's fucking sinking and i'm not sure we can bail the damn water out fast enough to save us.