The Saints of New Orleans' recovery
Home » Blog » Craig Neilson » The Saints of New Orleans' recoveryThe streets of New Orleans are blocked again today, but locals are celebrating their achievements and there's not a drop of flood to be seen.
Image: Matthew Hinton, The Times-Picayune
I don't care an awful lot for most sports, let alone American football. So why am I excited that the New Orleans Saints will take on the Indianapolis Colts at the Superbowl 2010?
Because … New Orleans. My couchsurfer says it best:
The New Orleans Saints (the American football team from the city where I'm from) have just won the championship and are going to the Superbowl. They have never done this before in their 43-year history of being a team, and have been a ridiculed as one of the worst (and usually the worst) teams in the league for their entire history.
The streets of New Orleans are going crazy, fireworks are being shot, and nobody can leave the city due to crowds. It's a big deal because lots of people see it as a symbol of the city's prosperity and recovery from the hurricane.
And, from Fox News (perhaps the only time I will link to Fox News for serious):
“You can draw so many parallels between our team and our city,” said Brees, who has helped spearhead New Orleans’ revival on and off the field through his stellar play and fundraising efforts. “We’ve had to lean on each other to survive and get to where we are now. It’s special and unbelievable.”
Team sports are famously linked to politics and prosperity, and here we have a brand new underdog we can all get behind.
Repair and reconstruction on an environmental and civic scale is hard, and for nearly four-and-a-half years the Big Easy has struggled to restore infrastructure and simultaneously upgrade its systems on an insanely tight budget. When ruined public housing was torn down, New Orleans' post-hurricane homeless population soared to 12,000, an astonishing 4% of its 300,000-strong population. By 2009, homelessness had dropped by 64%, to less than its intensity before the hurricane.
New Orleans is still shaking off a public perception of crumbling, abandoned ruins, and while there's a lot of work to do yet, this kind of example is something locals can all be proud of.
I mean, do you see what they're bouncing back from? It took more than a year to restore drinking water to all parts of New Orleans city. This is what the streets looked like in 2005:
Image: Wiki Commons: Infrogmation
And here's what they look like today:
In disaster, people pull together. I'm constantly telling people we should avoid an "inevitable" environmental, social and economic collapse because we can't become ultimately richer for it. Yet the New Orleans Saints are on their way to America's sporting event of the year. My wisdom has been tested.
I won't be watching the game, but I hope they win. If you want to get behind them, the rallying cry is simply: "WHO DAT?!"
Mon February 08, 2010 @ 05:36 PM
