November 19, 2006 A Study in Contradiction
I have come to realize what a study in contradictions this area is.
This is a southern state with all the friendliness and warmth one associates with the south. People smile and give you directions, they willingly offer “tour guide” advice so you can enjoy the area, and they chat with me on the street when I am walking Tank. Then the very next minute they are yelling because Tank has “done his business” in public, or angrily blowing their horn, shaking their fist and yelling when I slow down to try to find the name of street because there are few street signs. When I mentioned this to a couple of New Orleans Police they smiled and simply said, “Yeah, it’s like we are a southern Brooklyn”.
The weather itself is a contradiction. One moment it’s sunny and beautiful, then in just a few hours the temperature has dropped and I find myself shivering. It can be cool during the day, and warm that night, instead of the other way around.
During the morning I can be standing in the ruins of an elementary school and then later that night find myself in a Wal-Mart watching life go on as though there hadn’t been a hurricane.
People here complain about the mayor, then re-elect him, a democrat with republican beliefs.
New Orleans reminds me of the book of Romans. This is Chapter 7, starting with verse 15, sometimes entitled "Torn Between One Way and Another":
"15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
21 So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23 but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin."
IHS,
Patricia