This morning I drove to work listening to kids call up one of the local morning shows to talk about the murder of Messy Mya. He was a popular YouTube personality with some folks in our city and in the bounce music community. I have seen his clips a few times but I wouldn’t call myself a fan. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get his murder out of my head last night. I think it was because someone shot in at a public event in front of all kinds of people and no one said anything. Then someone had the nerve to take a picture of his murdered body and sent it out to Twitter and Facebook. This was something so horrible that I thought about ending my accounts on both websites. We have reached a new low. I just couldn’t believe we have gotten so savage that anyone could stand around and actually take pictures of the body. I’ve lived in New Orleans through the worst possible times of drugs and crime and we never took life and death for granted enough to hang around and snap pictures of it. How did all those people sleep last night after being so close to that scene? Just thinking about the coldness of it all bothered me and I didn’t know the brother.

If all the folks out there dancing around with him loved this kid so much they would tell the police who took him away like that and let justice take care of it. Hopefully that happens today. If not it’s going to make a sad situation even sadder. We can keep this kind of violence up but the city is changing. The people in position to make decisions didn’t come up with the same traditions we did. They are trying to move the city forward and if you are not going to act right then they can eliminate that stuff and not lose any sleep over it because to most people it would be the right thing to do for the benefit of the city.

Pretty soon there won’t be any block parties, second lines or anything else. Everything outside of the French Quarter is going to shut down early. The neighborhood groups will run down to City Hall screaming racism only to look like a bunch of jackasses to the rest of the world when the media pushes out the crime statistics and stories like this kid getting shot in the face in front of a crowd and no one saying anything. When that day comes don’t look for me to help out the cause. I’ll be sitting on my sofa saying I told you so. We continue to be our own worst enemy.