public health interlude

happy tuesday! a handful of letters to send out into the world this week: such a great feeling.

i'm taking a class called "Violence as a Public Health Problem," which is fascinating for 100000 reasons. mostly i find this topic because it's such a unique and gigantic public health problem here in New Orleans. the murder rate in New Orleans is 10 times the national average. gang violence is virtually nonexistent here, and neither the bloods nor the crips have ever had a presence in this city. this makes NO unique among U.S. cities with high rates of violence. almost everyone who dies by violence in NO dies by "assassination" (that is, they are specifically targeted). this means that drive-by / random victims are quite rare. these patterns make NO unique, and it also means that NO needs different solutions that other places.

keep in mind that Louisiana's incarceration rate is twice the national average. it also has a for-profit prison system, so there are real economic benefits to keeping the incarceration rate as high as possible (if that's interesting to you at all, the Times-Pickayune series on that topic is a must-read. here's a teaser on the series from the NY Times).

we had a speaker in class today from Ceasefire New Orleans, which is an organization that was started in Chicago (although their mission & methods are quite different here than in the Chicago chapter, as the violence/level of gang activity are different). they do incredible work, building community capacity and working with high-risk youth that society has basically given up on. it's speakers like that that remind me of what attracted me to this city, and what excites me about public health. it also reignites my belief that we have a strong collective responsibility to those most vulnerable in our society. to read more about Ceasefire's work, click here.

after a long day at school, i went to a great event tonight sponsored by ACLU Louisiana, NOW, and Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast called "What Matters to Women, Matters to America." the event was a roundtable conversation about national & Louisiana policies which affect women. the speakers were incredible. it's so fascinating to study & discuss these topics in Louisiana, where the poverty rate is so high, and the conservative/evangelical mindset to so pervasive.

Louisiana ranks 50th or 51st (when we're counting D.C.) out of the U.S. states on so many measures of health and economics. it's usually tied with or vying for 51st alongside Mississippi, which, let's remember, just ratified the 13 amendment, thereby abolishing slavery, this week. it's such a fascinating place to talk about these problems, and to grapple with how we can talk about these issues outside of rooms of like-minded others.