My entire family is in Mississippi. My dad has managed to call me twice, just long enough to tell me that they have lost everything - absolutely everything. One of my brothers called me and said, 'We are barely surviving - can you help?' I had been watching the destruction on television in disbelief, and that phone call was enough for me. I cannot sit idly by while these people, especially my loved ones, have nothing. I felt guilty that night taking a shower...these people don't even have a place to rest their head.
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Mark Twain, in an interview today, spoke about hazing at West Point, and denounced the practice as a brutal one and men who indulge in it as bullies and cowards. Why, he said, the fourth class man who is compelled to fight a man from the first class hasn't a show in the world, and it is not intended that he should. I have read the rules provided to prevent such practices, and they are wholly deficient, because one provision is omitted. I would make it the duty of a cadet to report to the authorities any case of hazing which came to his notice; make such reports a part of the vaunted West Point 'code of honor' and the beating of young boys by upper class men will be stopped. I am not opposed to fights among boys as a general thing. If they are conducted in a spirit of fairness, I think it makes boys manly, but I do oppose compelling a little fellow to fight some man big enough to whip two of him. When I was a boy, going to school down in the Mississippi Valley, we used to have our fights, and I remember one occasion on which I got soundly trounced, but we always matched boys as nearly of a size as possible, and there was none of the cowardly methods that seem to prevail at West Point.
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For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam. I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swanlike sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.
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When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous--a man who brutalizes people. But *you* love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change--and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it--at which point they can become human too.
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[I asked Barbour who would win in November, and here is what he said:] Mark, if this election is about John Kerry, then George W. Bush will be re-elected. ... In that case, Mark, George W. Bush will carry Mississippi.
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I have yet to meet (a socialist) who was not as gullible as a Mississippi darkey - nay, as a Mississippi white man
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Oh, definitely and I talk about all the things that I really needed to make me happy at that point in time were outside of Mississippi, and now all the things that I need to make me happy are back there.
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