Beggar's Banquet

At first glance the two stories don't seem to have much in common.

The first, an Associated Press account of the appearance of New Orleanians before the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, asking for help with our out-of-control violent crime.

The second, about a charity auction held by Global Green USA, one of the items being a piano signed by Fats Domino, the proceeds of which would go toward rebuilding New Orleans.

But they have a disturbing thing in common: apathy.

You see, no one bid on the Fats Domino piano, which would have been a shoo-in seller even a year ago.

And only three members of the Senate Judiciary Committee even showed up for the New Orleans hearing. Apparently, whatever Mary Landrieu and David Vitter had to say was less important than a golf game or whatever truant senators do with their time when they're supposed to be working.

Talk about being dissed. But can you blame them, really? They're tired of hearing the same song and dance for the past two years. They're tired of seeing New Orleans with its hand out. You don't hear Biloxi begging, or Bay St. Louis. They're tired of Katrina. They're tired of us.

We're pretty darned tired of it, too. We're tired of begging and sounding pathetic and having the rest of the world "cluck cluck" down their noses at our neediness and apparent lack of ability to take care of ourselves. They want to know why we can't follow the American way, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and getting to work repairing our lives. The truth is, a lot of us have done exactly that. But we can't fix the infrastructures and the systems, and so we continue to beg.

And when the murder rate climbs 100% in the past year and we can't recruit cops to work here and what cops we do have depend on handouts and donations to have the port-a-potties in their FEMA trailer headquarters emptied...well, what are we to do?

I have no answers for this one.