Tonight, the Saints finally return to New Orleans to play their first true home game since Hurricane Katrina hit last August. While the re-opening of the Superdome and halftime performances by U2 and Green Day are likely to dominate the storylines, I only hope that the primetime appearance on Monday Night Football shines a light back on a tragedy that is too quickly being pushed into a memory.
A visit to New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward should be mandatory for every member of Congress. I made a trip a couple of weeks ago and it opened my eyes to what has yet to be done and the monumental tasks that still remain in the bayou.
Yet for me, I was able to slowly pass through and deal with my emotions, then hop a plane and return home to the comforts of my life. It is hard to believe that one morning, I was driving through a war zone of leveled neighborhoods and structures, replete with abandoned fighter planes and other tools of destruction – and that same evening, I was back at home, 800 miles away, in the air conditioning, watching football on cable, eating Bojangles. Hours before, I was watching old white people paying a tour bus to take them through the rubble so they could take photos of the remnants of poor black folks’ lives. It did not seem like it all happened in the same day — much less the same country.
Driveways with no homes at the end of them. Cars on top of houses. Houses on top of cars. Boats in the middle of the street. FEMA trailers parked next to signs offering to gut homes for 99 cents a square foot. An eerie silence as handpainted road signs let no one in particular know exactly where they are. Restaurants with billboards impaled in them. No signs of life. No smiles for miles. No laughing children, no crying adults, no shuffling elderly, no borne infants. Just a wasteland that smelled like hopelessness, a Dresden in my America. Just over there lies ongoing construction of a new levee that will attempt to hold back the tears. Around the corner is a stoop without a home, an abandoned teddy bear with no child left to hold it.
I hope the Saints play well tonight, because there aren’t many people right now more deserving or more in need of a reason to cheer than the natives of New Orleans. But more than a good game, I hope that Monday Night Football gives the city a platform to show the nation how far they have come ... but how far they have yet to travel.
2 comments:
I maybe an asshole but I am really tired of hearing about New Orleans from the media. All of the mainstream media paints this rosy picture that since the SuperDome is backup the city can resume as it was. So much money was WASTED on that shitass building instead of using the dollars and resources to help the people that really matter.
Read This post about How Jacked up New Orleans is
Chartruese put a citizens media project together where they went around and interviewed locals to get the real state of the city, ,the citizen media project
And watchin this video shot by one of the guys running the project really makes me wonder what he has found out.
But, i hope Crumpler has a good game for my fantasy team :)
I know what you are saying and you may have missed my point somewhat. I don't need another story involving Suzie Kolber interviewing Joe Horn about what it is like to a New Orleans Saint. But it is the underreported things you link to that will never be investigated until offshoots of the mainstream media take it upon themselves. And that's why it takes the mainstream media to be reminded again of some of what is going on so resources are pointed in that direction again. IMO
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