This is the.

Annual Waccomville Red Neck Christmas parade in West Monroe, Louisiana. It's just not your typical Christmas parade.

We've got a motorized lazy boy. You can't get much more Red Neck than that.

It's.

Hilarious. People would be throwing toilet.

Paper.

Rum and packets. It's toothbrushes. My goodness, it's always a good laugh. This part of our town, I don't think there's very many rules. It's pretty much anything goes.

But behind the jokes, there's a tough reality. Bakhamville is a very poor community, and the parade serves as a holiday toy drive.

I have been a child who has been less fortunate growing up, and I had the Red Nip parade, the fire.

Department give me and my brother's Christmas gifts. And this is.

My way of returning the love.

These ladies run Bakhamville Hope, a nonprofit that gives food to the needy. Is there a lot of meat? You need in this.

Community for that. Oh, my Lord, yes. People don't realize this is like a third world country. There's need for clothes, food, housing. There's many, many homeless in this area. There's a lot of abandoned homes, abandoned trailers that they're living in. And in the woods. They just makeshift tents. They were managing to survive until everything got so expensive and they couldn't afford the little apartments that they had or the houses. Interest rates skyrocketing of the milk, $5 a gallon. I know it's sensitive.

Subject, but do you guys have any thoughts about the upcoming presidential election? We hope.

Trump gets back in there and maybe he can straighten it out.

Why do you think he'd.

Straighten it out? Because it wasn't in this turmoil when he left. All this has managed to happen in the last three years. I think we are going downhill, especially for a parent like me that's a single mom. Come and not being able to find work. Feels like you keep getting put in a hole. You're trying to climb out, but you keep getting knocked down.

President Biden's campaign has been pushing biodynamics, saying the economy has gotten better since he's been in office. But while by some metrics that's true, wages are higher, inflation is falling, public opinion polls show that people still think it's bad. There's some commentary, pun, to true that says, Well, yeah, inflation was bad, but now it's lower. The economy was bad, but now it's better. Unemployment is lower. What do you say to those people?

I say that's a big fat lie.

Okay, why?

Just give me some details. I mean, look at our pocketbooks. What little people may have been able to save from the stimulus we got and all that. It's gone. People are living off credit now if they even have that. I don't know how these families that come to this Red Neck parade, this community, even can buy groceries because you got to either choose to buy gas, or do I buy groceries, or do I pay my electric bill?

Louisiana is a deep red state, and neither presidential campaign will spend much money to win over voters here. There were a few Trump flags at the parade, but support for the former President had a different feel to what we felt in the run up to 2020. No comment. Many people didn't want to comment on politics, but those who did focused on the economy.

Economy, economic economy is horrible. We're ready for Trump to get, can I say that? Totally. We're ready for Trump to get back in. Can't wait. We're counting on it. I think he cares. It may be wrong, but I think he does. And not to say he's going to be perfect. We know that a lot of things he does. But for the most part, when he was in office, even with everything going on, he accomplished a lot.

And do you think that Biden doesn't care about people down here?

I don't think that he has a club.

You've probably seen a lot run in a convenience store.

Oh, yeah. They got problems with the drugs, the meth, and the fentanyl. That's here. It's prevalent. And the law still hadn't been able to deal with it. I blame Biden for that, too.

Who do you think you'd vote for in the 2024 presidential election?

Trump. Why? Because he's the only President in my knowledge who's giving back to the people and helps the people. If he's in jail, I'd vote for him.

And Nellie Reeves joins us now. You can hear all the news reports about unemployment levels dropping, inflation, cooling, but people aren't feeling it in a lot of places.

The people who were most animated when talking to us about politics were people who had jobs that put them working with people on the margins. Those two women who ran the food pantry, twice a month before COVID, they were giving out 70 boxes of free food a week. During the pandemic, it was 600, and it hasn't dropped.

It hasn't dropped since then. Yeah.

And Tony Bowler, she worked helping get in housing for mentally ill people, but there just isn't enough housing, and so a lot of them have to live in nursing homes.

So while.

None of these people might have been Biden fans to begin with, the economic problems they're talking about are real.

And finding work in that community, how difficult is it?

It is an't a community with a high poverty rate, a higher unemployment rate. I mean, you just walk around and there's a lot of people living really.

Difficult lives. It's interesting to see the role that parade plays in people's lives and that tradition of it and that young woman saying, As a child, these were Christmas gifts she was getting and she wants to give back now through this parade.

Yeah, it's like joking, but not joking. It. There were many really fancy pickup trucks there. Not everybody was broke, but there was a real understanding and acknowledgment of need there and also a celebration that like, Okay, we live like this. We're not like city folk, is what one person said. We like to be outside. This is.

How we have a good time. Yeah, it's a celebration of a remarkable and resilient community. Ellie Reed, thank you so much. Appreciate it.