The Spirit Lives On

David Zirin gave the keynote address at the Rising Tide Conference. He's a young sports writer, who loves sports but sees, without rose-colored glasses, the reality of so much that's wrong with sports today. He's a sportscaster/writer in the vein of Keith Olbermann, the thinking sports fan's man.

Early in his talk, he mentioned that in the midst of the wreckage left in New Orleans, the Superdome, the home of the New Orleans Saints football team, is back in business, fixed to the tune of $185 million. Priorities?

The images of the Superdome as "the homeless shelter from hell", as Dave labels it, had to be erased from sight and preferably from memory pretty damned quick. Last year, after losing season after season, the New Orleans Saints had a fantastic year, thus lifting the spirits of the fans who had remained faithful throughout the losing years. That's great. I'm happy for the Saints fans. Those who were in the Superdome after Katrina were generally not folks who could afford a ticket to go to a Saints football game. The Saints have their home back in shape. I wonder how many of the evacuees who sheltered there are back in their homes.

Dave recently published a book, titled Welcome to the Terrodome; the Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports , which I bought at the conference, but which I have not yet read. Keep an eye out for Dave as a young man on the way up - at least, I hope he's on the way up.

This post is in reference to an op-ed that he wrote in the Houston Chronicle upon his return from the conference:

I felt the fear before my plane even landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport. As we began our descent, dark jagged shadows jutted across the verdant swampland. It was all too cinematic. I found out later that what I thought were dramatic shadows was wetland defoliation; the banal reality proving to be far more frightening than the supernatural.
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I was in the Big Easy as an invited speaker at a conference of NOLA bloggers called Rising Tide II. In most cities, bloggers practice a peculiar virtual cannibalism, tearing each other apart for sport. But at Rising Tide, among people young and old, black and white, I saw my first glimpse of what can be termed blogger solidarity. It stemmed, as one told me, from "the necessity of coming together after Katrina."
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They were also the perfect people for me to speak with to learn the ground-truth about post-Katrina New Orleans. They're not paid to write about the myriad of issues they confront — from mental health to public housing to the loan swindles to the state of art. They do it because they want everyone — those staying away, the transplants from the North, the ones who get their information from the mainstream media — who sees New Orleans as merely a symbol to know the facts: the good, the bad and the ugly.

And the ugly side is that the majority black city is still being left to wither slowly on the vine. There is a reason President Bush did not say the word New Orleans in the last State of the Union. This is Moynihan's "benign neglect" writ large. But it has had a bizarre boomerang effect. Because the future of city is at stake, the neglect that guides federal policy is something that both whites and blacks have to confront.
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Katrina is something ephemeral, a sadness seeped into the humidity. It gets in your clothes, your eyes, your hair. It's everywhere, even if you aren't staring at a house with a black X, with a number underneath, denoting a death at the hands of levees.
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Make no mistake, there is anger and a sense of desperation among the city's poor. Sometimes it's inward, as the mental health and suicide studies show. Often it is outward, as the violent crime demonstrates. That feeling of being abandoned by this country and this criminal administration, of being left to die on a roof, remains. And yet, they still, so very inconveniently, continue to live, love and, most importantly, struggle and agitate. Everyone in this country should travel to New Orleans and be among a people supposed to perish, who act like they just didn't get the memo.

Amen, Dave.

You might want to read his book. All fifteen reviews give it five stars.