What you see below are two photos of the first game back in the Louisiana Superdome after Katrina. The New Orleans Saints, who spent the entire 2005 season on the road, occasionally practicing in parking lots for lack of space, took on the Atlanta Falcons in a nationally televised game on Monday Night Football. U2 and Green Day performed before the game, and former president George H.W. Bush did the coin toss. A multitude of celebrities descended upon New Orleans for this game. The top photo was taken immediately after the emotional win by the Saints. Immediately below is an odd but interesting shot of Saints rookie Reggie Bush arriving at the Superdome in his brand new Hummer.
Still further down you see evidence of not only destruction but neglect. These pictures were taken more than a year after Katrina, and clearly nothing had been done. I drove through the streets of the Ninth Ward in my goofy rental car, and it was like driving through a ghost town. This was an area I knew well. I used to drive through this neighborhood every day to get to work. I would pass through the Ninth Ward before dawn and even then there was activity. Now, on a Monday afternoon, it was deathly still, and that's the correct phrase.
It may seem incongruous to post pictures from a football game next to those from a natural disaster. Many people have been critical that the Superdome was fixed before neighborhoods were rebuilt. There are a couple of points about that I want to make:
-First of all, I had to flee that storm with my wife, our two dogs and four cats. We stayed in a motel for as long as we could. Then we had to burden her aunt and uncle, spent weeks wondering when we could go home, wondering if everything we owned was destroyed. I spent hours online trying to find out if the kids I taught for three years survived the 20 foot storm surge that destroyed St. Bernard Parish. Then we had to burden MY aunt and uncle for five months until I found a job to replace the one Katrina took from me. And this is the Cliff's Notes version of the experience! The point is, I don't want to hear criticism about how things are done in New Orleans from people who don't know what Pat O'Brien's is, who can't pronounce Tchoupitoulas because they never drove on that street, who don't know what it means when you find the baby in the king cake.
- Second, look at the people reaching out to Reggie Bush in those pictures. Look at the people in the crowd cheering after the game. You can see what this meant to them. They NEEDED this. I grant you that these are mostly white faces, and you wouldn't have seen those faces in the Ninth Ward even before Katrina. But I talked to rich white people who arrived at the Superdome in a Lexus, and I talked to the black fellow who drove me there in his taxi, and they held the same opinion that this was a good thing. Hell, it meant more to the guy driving the cab because he finally had another Saints game to generate business.
- Finally, I don't really expect many people to see these pictures, because I don't expect many people to see this blog. It's mostly for my own amusement. I'll get my friends to check it out, and that will be about it. But I feel about this post kind of the way I felt about teaching. Whenever I would get frustrated trying to help a kid who wouldn't or couldn't help himself, I would remind myself that if just one student benefitted from what I taught, then that in itself was a victory. And so if just one person - someone in my family, a colleague from work - ANYBODY - remembers what happened in New Orleans from seeing this post, then mission accomplished.
