The view from Louisiana:

Over thirty years ago, the novelist Walker Percy (another Louisianan by adoption) began his novel Love in the Ruins with a question that conveys the apocalyptic mood that suffuses this part of the world:

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I cam to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Has “it” happened? Is this the way the world ends? Not with a bang or a whimper, but with wind and rain and fire and flood? For countless Louisianans, their world has ended. Will they build another one?