[Original post: September 1, 2005]
I'm just back from Alexandria (Alec), which is the city-of-sorts around here, running errands for the people we're staying with.
Went into the Books-A-Million to buy a coffee; the guy behind the counter told me: "I'm enjoying y'all being here." Except for one lady yesterday, he said, who complained that he was chatting with the
customers too long, and that there should be more than one cash register open. "And I told her, you are our guest here! If you don't like it, you can just go home and swim."
On sale on the counter: red wristbands for sale for $1 with the message "I Live for Him." (Proclaim your faith, the sign urged.)
The conversation turned to the violence, rising as the flood recedes. The clerk's brother-in-law is a paramedic, he said; yesterday, he and colleagues drove into New Orleans to help the relief effort. After their car was shot at, they turned around and came home.
"They need to kill some of these looters," he said. "Not just wound them, but actually kill them."
Another customer (grizzled, sitting alone a table without a drink) got up to join the conversation. "New Orleans is a terrible place anyway," he said. "Right now ..." He shook his head. Words could not express what it's like right now, apparently, and I left before the conversation turned to God's vengeance on gay people, heavy drinkers and Mardi Gras floats.
Driving back to Marksville, on the radio I heard a description of the four levels inside the Superdome: it sounded like the four layers of hell - dead bodies, a slick of excrement and urine, speakeasies in the
corporate boxes.
And here is House Speaker Dennis Hastert in Chicago's Daily Herald, asked about rebuilding the city: "It doesn't make sense to me ... It's a question that certainly we should ask."
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