Paradise or Paradise Lost; An Insight into New Orlean's Gray Areas

As a newcomer to New Orleans there are so many different historical and social aspects to take in order to truly understand the town that it can be overwhelming.  This is not an easy town to 'understand' as it were, there being contradicting factions deviating like an ekg line back and forth over the status quo.  Homeless people and millionaires can be seen traversing the same commute by foot, there is all of this joy and energy and happiness flanked with misery, guns, shootings, and murders.  A town fostered by nuns and known for its prostitution, with music notes drifting through back alleys striking the same cords as the struggle of an armed robbery.  

I think on this constantly trying to put it all together. I walk past a condemned a house with ivy coming out of the chimney and meth heads squatting in filth on the rickety remains of a floor, next to a beautifully restored home.  I can be quite difficult to process.

The thing is, sometimes I get lulled into this sense of security or safety here.  I feel comfortable walking to my destinations, and looking someone in the eye as I pass them and attempting to exchange some sort of minimal cordiality.  I am constantly surrounded by intelligent, artistic, goal-driven, and just relatively decent human beings, all drawn or kept here by the same intrinsic need to be somewhere special.  Because no matter how many murders happen here there is still something so special about this place, and the first balance you experience is finding a way to digest this bad and this good.

The second balance is how you feel about being acquiescent towards the bad and what you can do to change it without driving yourself insane.  This is the conflict that has caught me at a stalemate.  There are so many chasms, nooks, divots, and potholes to this problem it kind of feels like imagining the infinity of space. 

I don't know what the solution is.  Maybe if we concentrate on an investment in family's involvement with the educational system and visa versa, as well as the level of education provided for the lower income neighborhoods.  Or we can actually address this culture of violence that reigns like a giant roided bully shadowing over you, menacingly punching his fist into his other hand preparing for cowardly battle, the toleration of violence is a failure of the government, police force, and society.  A half-hearted acquiescence at the sound of gun shots in the night? I think not.