The Saints won--enough already

I'll come clean right now and say that I am not a football fan and I never will be. To me, football is an uninteresting, thinly-veiled homoerotic free-for-all accompanied by near-illiterate interviews and commentary.

However, those of you who read this blog know that I do appreciate athleticism, and I totally understand the emotion that accompanies sport. I have postponed a dinner until after a tennis match, postponed most of my life until after a Grand Slam, gone to extraordinary lengths to watch a match on television, and shed tears over losses. I understand the emotions felt by New Orleanians when the Saints gave them an enormous win Monday night, even though I do not share them.

But the carrying on is already, in my opinion, ridiculous. Thousands of New Orleanians watched the game from various parts of the United States because they have not been able to return to their houses, or their houses have disappeared. Many left because they no longer had jobs. Many who stayed have rebuilt their houses, only to look next door and see a pile of trash that is inviting only to rats and termites. There is still debris all over the city, there is a very serious shortage of medical services (including badly needed mental health services), many of the city's landmarks are in almost total disrepair because the federal government has no intention of rebuliding them, and--most important of all--the levees are not safe.

It's okay to get excited over a football victory and the national publicity that surrounds it, but New Orleans has always been viewed as more of a show than a place where people actually live and work. It is beyond me how anyone can think the Saints victory and all that surrounded it can draw tourists when the lead stories in the newspaper every day are about the latest murders and robberies. New Orleans was in bad shape before Katrina, with a high crime rate, signficant poverty, a high rate of child abuse, and the most corrupt and inefficient school board in history. Now we can add to that a lack of services, lack of jobs, and a hyprocritical, swaggering mayor who stumbles and bumbles at every turn.

What's not to feel optimistic about?