National Mardi Gras

The next major holiday season coming up here in New Orleans is Carnival. We need to leverage that unique New Orleans celebration to focus attention on New Orleans' ongoing problems.

Sign the petition to declare 2/28/2006 National Mardi Gras:

Hurricane Katrina was a wake up call.

After a moment of thrashing about, America hit the snooze button. No surprise. All the stuff we’ve tried to forget so many years — race, class, environment, energy, health, “law & order” — all our dirty laundry washed into public view for the world and all our kids to see. It was too much pain, too much shame, too much betrayal to handle so close to dawn. Better to dream just a few minutes more.

That’s why we’re creating a National Mardi Gras. We want to revisit these issues and deal with them, in as inspiring a way as we can imagine. After the shock and the media circus, after the frantic federal response and all the promises made and broken, we will use Mardi Gras as a moment to return and refocus our energy on all the tough stuff we know we’ve got to wake up and work on. With National Mardi Gras, we can use the best of our shared culture to remind us how to turn sorrow into joy, death into life. We’ll put the culture in the front seat and the politics in the back. Maybe even gag the politics and stick it in the trunk. This is purple politics. Here’s the plan.

Sign now & help us circulate this petition. It calls on Congress to declare this February 28 (Mardi Gras 2006), a national holiday. Once we get 1 million signatures we’ll recruit the world’s finest New Orleans marching band and walk the petition up the stairs of the Capitol with the cameras rolling. Will there be congressmen willing to sponsor? Of course. Democrats who don’t want this fiasco forgotten, Republicans who don’t want to be seen as indifferent - again. And when the cameras are rolling, do they really need a reason?

So, citizen, we’re not asking for much. Lift one finger (other than the middle one), sign & forward the National Mardi Gras petition. Then, whatever our politicians do or don’t do, get up and party for America on February 28th, 2006.

Let the good times roll.
National Mardi Gras, 2006