(Louisiana Illuminator) — “Used to be, the saying was, ‘Where goes New Orleans, where goes the state,'” Gov. Jeff Landry told reporters this month. “That has changed.”
If New Orleans’ standing has fallen, it fell on his watch. A governor dismissing his own state’s largest city is not a burn. It is a confession.
And the audience is bigger than he thinks. Not just the state. Not just the country. The world is watching Louisiana right now — watching a sitting attorney general indicted on 16 felony counts in a fight over who controls a New Orleans courthouse.
Watching a governor veto $36 million in New Orleans projects — early learning centers, housing, a healthcare hub — and call it discipline.
Shakespeare opened “King Lear” with a ruler who carved up his own kingdom to feed his ego, demanded performances of loyalty and banished Cordelia, his daughter who refused to flatter him. The realm collapsed while he collected compliments.
“Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear warned.
Nothing is precisely what this feud produces for the people of Louisiana.
This state has been calling New Orleans a distraction since before the Civil War, through fights over bonds, tourism and recovery money ever since. The rivalry is the oldest blues song ever written in Louisiana. Landry is simply its newest performer.
New Orleans is not an island. It is not extracted from Louisiana. Every blow aimed at it lands on all of us. Because here is the truth: Louisiana is hurting. Rural parishes, urban parishes, suburban parishes — there is not one parish doing better than the other. All of us are on the same floor.
The state’s own legislative auditor found the child welfare system short at least 129 caseworkers, with frontline caseloads climbing from 9.3 cases a month to nearly 16 — well past the auditor’s standard of 10.
The state’s own agency reports roughly 4,600 children in foster care, children now represented in a class-action lawsuit describing a system its own former leadership called a “death spiral.”
These are not New Orleans numbers. These are Louisiana numbers.
Keep looking. Louisiana has the worst maternal mortality rate in America — 41.9 deaths per 100,000 births. The state’s own health department says 93% of those deaths were preventable.
Nearly a third of our parishes are maternity care deserts, and the strongest predictor is population density, not race. That crisis lives in Cajun country and the Delta as surely as it lives in any city.
Louisiana ranks dead last — 50th of 50 — in women’s and children’s health. Meanwhile, the state proposed cutting $125 million from K-12 education while growing the corrections budget 9%. Lawmakers left a teacher pay cut in place while raising pay for prison guards
And after repealing Raise the Age, nearly 70% of the 17-year-olds arrested as adults in the state’s three largest parishes were charged with nonviolent offenses.
This is what a kingdom looks like when the king is distracted by his own performance.
Every hour spent on this feud is an hour pulled away from that ledger. Conflict is not free. It drains the very resources — time, attention, political will — that a hurting state cannot spare, and it pushes us further from every goal we claim to hold.
Criminologists call the result strain and structural violence. Psychologists call it adverse childhood experiences. A foster child sleeping in a state office calls it Tuesday.
Before we write this off as just another petty rivalry, we must ask: while we are busy looking at the courthouse fight in New Orleans, what policies are quietly slipping through the backdoor in Baton Rouge? Who truly benefits when the public is too distracted to notice a state in decline?
Let’s be real: New Orleans’s economic weight is a real conversation. Ports, tourism, culture — that is not nothing. But it cannot be the only conversation this government is capable of having. A state that can find the energy to fight over a city’s bond authority can find the energy to fund a caseworker.
Louisiana does not have the luxury of a government distracted by its own reflection. The world is watching what we do next. More importantly, so are our children. Not just Black children. Not just white children. All of our children — in every parish, of every color, in the country and the city alike.
They did not choose this feud. They are simply paying for it, in caseloads and care deserts and courtrooms. Nothing will come of nothing. Our children deserve something.
The governor says Louisiana will now determine the fate of New Orleans, and not the other way around. Look at where Louisiana is going — 49th in child well-being, 50th in health, last in mothers surviving childbirth.
The saying needs updating — and not the way the governor thinks: Where go Louisiana’s children, there goes Louisiana.
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Andrea Hagan is a criminologist and the founder of Pattern Hunters LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement and accountability.
