Wednesday morning, 8:15am: A new video sponsored by the Church in the Midst of Life appeared on the LookyYou LookatYou website as a guest post. The video announced the church's regular hours – always open from 8:00am to 8:00pm, and making lunch and dinner and grief counselors and space available from Wednesday through Sunday for people affected by the shooting at Skylark Hall to come, eat, grieve, and talk to someone if they wanted to. This post was of course 16 hours behind the rally post, but it began to attract quite a lot of engagement and catch up.
8:45pm: Captain Lee, Lieutenant Hummel, and Chief Inspector Dubois had a short conference call about the plans of the Church in the Midst of Life. It was their opinion that the church was at low risk owing to the facts of the way the Beauty Killers operated and also because of the nearness of the church to police headquarters. However, Lieutenant Hummel did call Revs. Gordon and Baxter and work out plans for subtle police presence just in case.
10:15am: The first woman identifying herself as a survivor of the shooting arrived at the Church in the Midst of Life. She posted a guest post about an hour later: “I've been here an hour. These people are so kind and so real. I feel safe for the first time since the shooting, and maybe even longer.”
4:15pm: The Church in the Midst of Life passed serving 100 survivors at that point, and would top out on this first day at around 250.
Meanwhile, on the unmonitored website and social media accounts for LookyLou LookatYou, a difference of opinion turned into a civil war of words between those who supported the rally/meeting and those who were becoming interested in what was happening at the Church in the Midst of Life. The latter were getting a lot of encouragement from people who had left LookyLou LookatYou in earlier years and also the anti-MLM community online … going to the church and connecting with a different community was a sign of moving on, of exiting the cult mentally and spiritually. This was infuriating to those not ready to move on, and the war of words intensified as Wednesday became Thursday and Thursday became Friday.
Lieutenant Hummel had been tickled pink by a serious conversation held between Captain Lee and Chief Inspector Dubois about the war of words on Thursday.
“You know me, honey,” he said to Mrs. Hummel. “I'm just a country boy working in the city and I've never been outside Virginia and I don't plan on it outside of an emergency – I've never been able to sit around with international law enforcement intellectuals before! Those two! I don't know which one is more refined! Lee is everything you would have expected his Uncle R.E. to be, and I don't care what anybody says: there have got to be some African kings and queens back there in Dubois's background in addition to one or two French nobles. They are both so different and yet so much the same: so regal they are wonderfully ridiculous in 2020!”
“So we were having our last conference call for today and were discussing our monitoring of the online hooli-ha around the Church in the Midst of Life having a closure event for survivors to go to instead of that rally somehow meant to keep LookyLou LookatYou going. Not everybody wants to let this thing go and ain't shy in letting it be known what they think of those on the other side.
“Things got really bad and really stupid just about the time we were going to have our call, and by the time I got on the line the other two were talking about it in these terms:
“ 'I am not sure I even know how to describe the nature of what is being said here – not just the complete lack of emotional control but the disorganization in the thought process.'
“ ' I would describe this kind of discourse as unkempt, sir, like the appearance of someone waking from a delirious dream angry with the person who woke them.'
“ 'I concur – the descriptor fits all of the facts.'”
Mrs. Hummel smiled.
“It's so good to be around people we can learn from,” she said. “I'll never think of waking up on the wrong side of the bed the same way again.”