There isn’t a week that goes by where someone doesn’t ask me why I’m still in Louisiana and what my plans to leave are.
There’s a consensus among even lifelong residents of this state that it doesn’t have a long-term future.
It’s a pervasive line of thinking on an issue where perception is everything.
Louisiana and its leaders have become a broken record throughout my life, promising to move us up from the bottom of the bad lists, and to the top of the good ones.
The problem is that when it’s time for decisions to be made and money to be spent to advance the state, there are more often excuses and broken promises than there are actions that the people of Louisiana can be proud of.
We can take the missed opportunities here at LSU as an example of the broader problems throughout Louisiana, with one of our most glaring missed opportunities being the National Cancer Institute designation.
President William Tate IV announced in February the university’s goal of achieving NCI Designation as part of his “scholarship first” agenda.
But the problem is that the university first set its sights on that goal in 1995, after it was awarded a planning grant from the federal government with a runway of three years for realization, according to a contemporaneous report from The Advocate.
The state failed to garner the designation due to insufficient investment. It’s a classic example of the state’s budgetary priorities being out of line with its stated priorities.
The basic story of overpromising and willfully under-delivering is one that’s repeated across Louisiana. Our leaders promise things will be different each time. Yet each time, nothing changes.
Those of us that have lived in Louisiana all our lives find it hard to believe promises of transformational change seriously given the widespread ineptitude from our leaders, that has brought us to where we currently are as a state.
I want Louisiana to succeed because the people of this state don’t deserve the misery that has been brought onto them by their leaders. However, I’m cautious to give too much credit to those who say the right things because our past shows that talk often doesn’t translate into action.
For our state to succeed, we need to hold our leaders accountable for our current situation and stop accepting blind promises for a better tomorrow. Politicians continue their failures because they know that too many of us lack the follow-through to ensure that they’re working toward truly bettering Louisiana.
Our three-year-plan to gain NCI designation turned into a 30-year-plan. That’s a shame. And it’s a story repeated time and time again here in Louisiana.
Stories like this are the reason for Louisiana residents to be pessimistic about the future. We need leaders to consistently show us contrary results, in order to change that.
Charlie Stephens is a 21-year-old political communication senior from Baton Rouge.
