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I don't understand, I don't understand, I don't understand.
How is it that when a young man is getting ready to leave his house on a Sunday afternoon to attend a second line parade in the city, he scans over his bedroom dresser and runs a mental checklist before he heads out the door:
Wallet. Cell phone. Keys. Breath mints. Pistol. Check.
WTF, man. W!T!F!
It happened again Sunday. The Black Men of Labor Social Aid & Pleasure Club kicked off the city's traditional second line season in glorious colorful fashion and was then followed by, sadly, another local tradition: Somebody unloading a few clips into crowds of families watching a parade.
And the cries go out...again: Ban the second lines.
The problem is not the second lines.They're just one of many settings that allow for large gatherings of young men and the grotesque pathology at work in this town that dictates that wherever several young men are gathered together, the presumption is that there will be a gun within reach and probably a score to settle.
And with that, I have breached an unholy mantra.
When I see five guys hanging out together who dress in gangsta fashion, assume gangsta posture, make gangtsa gestures and speak in gangsta idiom...I am afraid. Posturing, indeed, may be all it is.
But If it walks like a duck?
And that's the thing: Ducks don't pack heat and that's why on a Sunday afternoon, you're more likely to find me with my kids by the lagoons in City Park and not where I'd rather be with them: At one of this city's most fascinating and joyful displays of indigenous culture and bearing witness to the finest expression of civic harmony that exists here or anywhere: Dancing in the street.
Black Men of Labor president Fred Johnson hit it on the head when he said: "I don't like the connotation that the parade is a signature of death, the parade is a signature of destruction, the parade is a signature of all that's bad. We don't have a parade problem. What we have here is a societal problem."
Dead on, Mr. Johnson. Dead on.
This here is a persistent social disease, unresponsive to conventional protocols, resistant to modern treatment.
We're smarter than the ducks. We've got more money than the ducks. Hell, for that matter we've even got more guns than the ducks.
But they've got the streets. And when you get too many ducks in one place, as often as not.......somebody's gonna get quacked.
