Alabama Alternatives

Tzadik and I go to the only NSA (Network Spinal Association) practitioner in Alabama for entrainments. It is wonderful to access the healing community in the South, to counter the popular myth of “Red States” being devoid of such resources. Then I have a CODEPINK conference call which I am on from my cell phone in the car. Tzadik and I visit the Civil Rights museum and the 16th Avenue Baptist Church where the four young girls were killed during the bombing. This is a very emotional experience for both of us, as we recount our country’s recent history and look at the similar paradigms being repeated today in intolerances towards gay rights, anti-war activism, and the “war on terror” fear-based politics dominating the media and (less and less) popular American worldview. It is also disheartening to see how though everyone now has a right to vote, the majority of people, regardless of race, feel (and I think that this is the reality) that their votes are not being counted.

We stop at the library on the way out of town to check email and we drive through the Southern forests to Louisiana. Tzadik gets many more magnetic ribbons in Alabama, Mississippi (at Wal-Mart and at a Winn Dixie strip mall) and we reach New Orleans in the late evening. We go to several bed and breakfasts but everything is booked because of the hurricane warnings; folks are fleeing Florida and coming to Mardi Gras central. The brief news I hear on the radio and see on commercial TV sensationalizes the whole thing, like everything else, highlighting “flashbacks” from the devastating hurricane of 1999, instilling paranoia and fear into the masses, as usual. Tzadik and I discover the India House youth hostel by asking a tarot card reader in the park about where to stay and we go there and spend the night for a minimal fee in our own room with honest-to-goodness bunk beds. It is hot and we fall asleep almost instantly upon arrival, having syrupy dreams and waking sweaty and thick.