https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByxvSMfhElGCWUQ2MXdEU29HVzA/view?usp=sharing

My Grandfather’s farmhouse and the Blue River in Texas County, Missouri. It is beautiful there, but this is where a gunman killed six and then shot himself last week.

There was a very disturbing article in The Daily Beast: Texas County today is marked by the suffocation of Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches who keep vigilant watch over the ugodly, which probably includes a smattering of Episcopalians and Catholics. They’ve bought up nearly all the local liquor licenses to keep the area dry, in an Ozark variation on Sharia Law.

Life there is also marked by chronic and deep-rooted joblessness, by a thriving trade in meth and by meth addiction, and by violence. Sometimes folks just vanish.

It sounds like a scary, hopeless place, and it was once a place of pretty little farms, pasturage grazed by horses that were a family’s pride, forests full of game, and neighbors who looked out for each other.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal and electricity–and hope–came to Texas County, because we agreed that we all have an obligation to look out for each other. Today, all Congress can do is bicker, delay, posture and sulk. These are good people. What is to be done?