Insurgents in Our Mist

Insurgents!

 I live a whisper away from the sainted city of New Orleans. A place steeped in history, draped in the Spanish moss of parasitic mystery. A place where one can get lost in magic, the magic of the architecture of the French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; the music of Africa, Spain, France and their fused souls; and, of the food, a strange and beautiful a gift of the land and waters that surround it, and made soul stirring by the hands that touch it lovingly.

And, then, creeping in like the low fog off the mighty Mississippi is the increasing fear of the insurgents. Yes, insurgents are afoot in this beautiful city of New Orleans. The society it seems is now being threatened at every corner by the insidious insurgents that grow like a plague in the city. While government grinds slowly forward to find solutions, and headlines blare scares of “tourism revenue may be lost”, the armed insurgents roam the city killing and maiming at whim. Meanwhile, we hold our pain and watch the insurgent fog, and pray to the pantheon of deities, that the problems that have created the rise of insurgency can be discovered and explained and reconciled. Then, peace, or at least a semblance of normalcy can be restored. Certainly other cities have had to fight the insurgents that leave the collateral damage of shattered families and lives to mourn. Here under the flag of jazz funerals, which seek to ease those left behind into the river of healing, death seems less damnable, but hearts don’t heal any faster and loss threatens to turn us all into refugees in a familiar land.  Where are the answers, how do we return to peace time and, how do we turn back the fog? Start the fires along the rivers so the answers can find us through the fog of insurgency and return us to our New Orleans state of mind.

These are the musings of my straddling the Mason/Dixon Line, and while they might draw ire and criticism or laughter, you can easily find me.

I will be sitting, in the meantime, on the Crown Stone.

Though historically the Mason/Dixon Line is the demarcation of the Eastern part of the United States that would remain  free states and the Southern part of the United States that would be slave states, in popular culture the Mason/Dixon line is that empirical boundary that separates the North from the South and for my soul stirrings, from the West as well.

Crown Stones are markers placed at every fifth mile of the Mason Dixon Line bearing the family coat of arms of the state it faced.