Saturday, January 06, 2007

A War against Tourism??

I obviously wrote the previous post as satire....but it got me thinking.

I don't know about the rest of you....but I feel incredibly frustrated with our city's leadership and their utter failure on so many fronts, violent crime being the most obvious.

The question becomes....what can we do about it.

The blog community is obviously outraged, as is I supsect, the community in general. In the same week Nagin and Riley are publicly stating that we're making progress....we have almost twice as many New Orleanians murdered than American soldiers in Iraq. (ht/Loki)

It's not enough that we're being lied to by our national leader...Nagin's empty rhetoric on our battle against crime echoes Bush's empty rhetoric on our war against terrorism.

I think I may have come up with a way to get Nagin's attention and force him to answer to this. I think we should start an online campaign to warn tourists "DO NOT COME TO NEW ORLEANS: YOU MAY BE KILLED". If we could get some national press with the effort, it would send a clear message to the country how dangerous our city is and possibly force Nagin to answer to the problem.

With carnival coming up...the last thing Nagin needs is bad press. I want to force him to take responsibilty for this nightmare.

Whaddya think?

7 comments:

oyster said...

Too brutal. It would get the required attention, but would afflict local business-owners more than Nagin.

I wouldn't have the heart unless we could soften it through satire, sarcasm and some sort of policy prescription.

Anonymous said...

Though I would hate to harm businesses in the city, I think it's a freakin' good plan.

Here's how to do it: plan out what we Bloggers can do, write the press release, create the ad, and then tell "No See Um" Ray that we WILL fire that puppy out through the Blogosphere.

Yes it's blackmail, but it'll hit him where he lives: the Bosum of Mammon and it just might freak out the big businesses enough for them to lean on our Invisible Mayor.

The above can also be used for all of the Festivals this season.

(I am an evil twisted person.)

Anonymous said...

I think it's a great idea. In fact I kinda started to try it by leaving messages on the Trip Advisor N.O. forum site about the dangers of New Orleans and they deleted the messages and then block my login ID. They said the posts were not family friendly. Anyway, how do we do this? Where do we post?

TravelingMermaid said...

Maybe a weekly march on City Hall? If the one on Thursday gets any kind of media attention maybe we can snowball it with a weekly march - demand action. Let the country and the city officials know we will NOT tolerate the current state of affairs.
Brian Williams seems sympathetic to Nola. What about an email blitz to him about the march on Thursday - maybe it'll make the news. He did have a story Friday about the murder rate upsurge here. Just a thought.....

Mark Folse said...

I think that the threat of this, as an ultimatum to Nagin that he and Riley should resign, should not be rejected.

Anonymous said...

Mark, you see where I'm going with this. The last thing in the world I'd do is hurt NOLA, but I'd rather have less tips from a job than have bullets pumped into my body.

I think this is something for the NOLA Bloggers or Rising Tide to do. The PTB cannot touch us, and if they attempt it, we Blog that one out too.

This is Citizen activism plain and simple. This is the folks of the city stating "Enough".

BTW- I want Jordan out along with Nagin and Riley.

G Bitch said...

Isn't "DO NOT COME TO NEW ORLEANS: YOU MAY BE KILLED" already playing in the national media? It's not a plan, it's happening. Weekly marches is a good idea but asking too much--once a month. Raise more stink about the lack of competent leadership (despite their salaries). There has to be some way of shoving their shit back in their faces.