New Orleans’ terror attack forces a great city yet again to face down a nightmare

New Orleans CNN — Not yet 30 hours after a driver on a terror mission turned her city’s most famous street into a nightmare of indiscriminate bloodshed, a barista at a coffee house far Uptown carried an order to the counter. “It’s almost like it was coached up, like something is still going to happen,” he said as he walked past a rack vending the latest edition of the city’s 188-year-old daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune, with a headline screaming: “Act of Terrorism.” For Cleo Ebanks, the attack went “deeper” than any other act of violence she’d known since her college days in New Orleans, she said Thursday as her family waited for lunch outside Li’l Dizzy’s, a local institution specializing in gumbo and fried chicken, catfish and shrimp in Tremé, among the nation’s oldest African American neighborhoods. “We went on past it, but you know, you’re gonna have those little moments.” ‘You get back up and then you do it’ But like that, New Orleans yet again carries on. “So, it is really like, oh my gosh, like a ‘what next’ type of feeling,” City Council President Helena Moreno said Thursday afternoon over the din of the crowd as the Sugar Bowl got underway. But like so many here, Moreno, now running in the fall’s open mayoral race, has learned across decades scarred by tragedies in her adopted hometown to “just handle the situation … and then you live in this amazing city that you just adore.” “You have your moment,” she said, “and then you go, and then you get back up and then you do it.” As Bourbon Street reopened Thursday, its pavement still damp from pressure-washing and yellow roses wrapped in red set against a wall near Canal Street – where the pickup driver first slammed into the French Quarter – the co-owner of The Alibi Bar and Grill, Charles Weber, was “glad we opened.” “They’re not gonna win.