Here’s a video making the rounds this morning. It comes from the declining city of Alexandria, Louisiana, and it isn’t shocking. This is what happens on the weekends in pretty much every urban area in this state…

Alexandria is a pretty moribund place, a city whose geography should dictate a booming, thriving economy based on transportation and logistics, manufacturing (particularly of wood products given the excellent timber lands all around it) and oil and gas. It has nothing remotely close to what it ought to.

Instead, it has what you see in the video.

And Alexandria is relatively well off. Take the video above, subtract the cops who barely show up for anything and then add gunshots to it, and you’d have this past weekend in New Orleans…

New Orleans police are investigating a violent 24 hours that saw 10 men wounded in seven separate shootings.

The latest shooting happened Monday (July 25) just before 4 a.m. at the intersection of Bolivar and Poydras Streets, not far from the Superdome. Police say a 29-year-old man heard gunshots and realized he was struck. The victim arrived at the hospital in a private vehicle.

A few hours earlier, just after midnight, police say four men were shot in Central City in the 2000 block of St. Andrew Street. Police say the victims — ages 54, 48, 36, and 33 — were walking in the area and heard gunshots. They were shot multiple times and transported to the hospital in unknown conditions.

Four people were shot in four separate incidents Sunday. In each of the shootings, police provided their typically scant details.

First, a man was shot Sunday morning (July 24) on Bourbon Street, New Orleans police said. The victim was shot around 7:20 a.m. in the 100 block of the French Quarter’s most famous street, just off Canal Street.

Then, police say a man was shot at around 6:28 p.m. in the Lower Ninth Ward in the 1300 block of Lamanche Street.

Next, around 8:39 p.m., the NOPD says a man was shot in the 4000 block of Downman Road in New Orleans East.

Around 10:51 p.m., police say another man was shot in the 2200 block of Humanity Street, near the I-610 off-ramp at Elysian Fields Avenue.

They don’t even bother to report the names of the victims anymore. Who can keep all of that straight?

It’s so bad that Metairie is now becoming a shooting gallery. Two people were murdered in a mere 30 minute span over the weekend. And there was a triple shooting in St. Charles Parish, with one dead. They’ve got drive-by shootings in Lafayette now.

Murders are everywhere in Louisiana. Where there aren’t murders there is chaos on the streets. Law enforcement on really happens in the suburbs, and that’s increasingly a losing fight.

Because Louisiana is dying, if it isn’t already dead. People we can’t afford to lose are moving out, and those left behind are increasingly hopeless and listless. The economy is shrinking, jobs are vanishing while other jobs go unfilled as workers pull back from the workforce – the state has just a 3.8 percent unemployment rate despite some 300,000 Louisianans quitting their jobs in the first six months of the year.

How does that happen? They’re leaving. Or they’re giving up and going on the dole, leaving the workforce.

Which will very often result in the kind of video you see from Alexandria over the weekend. Or the news stories from New Orleans and the other places.

Louisiana is dying. Louisiana can’t wait much longer for the revival it desperately needs.