F%cked up places youv'e been.

[Leah]

passing through Alabama back in 2002-3, I remember these rednecks chasing these two black guys down the road, and I heard gun shots. needless to say, I've never been to that part of Alabama. It was in the middle but closer to Mississippi.

[ER]

The Bogside, Derry, Northern Ireland in 1998. If Hell exists, the parts of Derry I saw must be its foyer. I thought I'd been to some bad places but I was shocked. I was nineteen years old and don't know what I was thinking going there that summer. It wasn't just the city per se, which to look at on the surface wasn't worse than many other past-prime, economically struggling industrial towns, it was the psychological aura of the place, the sense of gloom and the fact its people, Protestant and Catholic alike, were haunted by the past and angry and afraid in equal parts. They all knew someone who had been killed. They all were worried. Behind a lot of bluff and bluster and hate spewing tough talk there was this palpable depression that oozed through even when they tried to be pleasant. Poverty, hatred, paranoia, social decay such as I never knew existed was there, and yet I heard over and over, "Things here are so much better now than they used to be during the Troubles." The thing that got to me most was all the children there growing up in that. Even murals painted on walls schoolchildren had to walk past every day furthered hatred and kept the darkness of the past going. Murals with the faces of IRA "martyrs" on them, and murals of masked men with guns showing what would happen to the enemies of the gangs who ran districts. The Red Hand of Ulster on the sides of other buildings some with legends like: "Catholics, Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here." It was the worst place I've ever been, including recently some lurid slums in Rio de Janeiro.