New Orleans bringing out the best and worst
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Bill Cosby’s advice to New Orleans: Clean up your act.
“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city’s convention center.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children,” he said.
“What kind of a village is that?”
Jesse Jackson’s advice to New Orleans: Get mad at the government and demand special treatment.
Other speakers, including civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, denounced what they said was an attempt by state and federal officials to disenfranchise the evacuees in April 22 local elections by not setting up out-of-state voting stations.
Jackson said evacuees should be allowed to vote in “satellite” polling places outside the state, just as Iraqi and Mexican expatriates have cast ballots from the United States in elections in their home countries.
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- The Battle for New Orleans
- Senator Landrieu about can-do
- After Katrina
- Wacky mayor update
- Stories you won’t see in the NYT
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I love Bill Cosby. He always says things I wish I could say.
And I always remember how much he went through with the murder of his only son. Since Cosby had been doing routines for years about his first kid and then his two girls and then his boy, and eventually doing the show that was so much like his own family, you kind of felt like you knew this family. I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to have lost a friendly, outgoing son because he pulled over to help someone he thought was in trouble and was killed and his car stolen. I don’t know if I would ever stop being angry at the whole world (and God!) over something like that. But I saw Cosby on a guest appearance of “Touched by an Angel” he did not long after the trial. The show would’ve been trite and smarmy (as it so often was) except for the real face he put on an “angel of reconciliation.”
I don’t want to say that I agree with everything he says. He still comes out with some klinkers. But I think he’s showing incredible grit to go so counter-culture with these tough remarks to black audiences.