Dome improvement

How much is the human spirit worth?

Priceless, you say? Impossible to put a price tag upon, you suggest?

How about $143 million?

Tonight’s game between the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints has been the topic of some debate in my household over the past few weeks, and it has nothing to do with the over/under. While much of the greater New Orleans area remains ravaged by the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina, more than a year after its devastating trip through the Crescent City, the New Orleans Superdome opens its doors once again tonight in a nationally televised game that has been hyped as a significant step in the city’s rebuilding efforts.

It took $143 million in federal, state and private funding and the around-the-clock efforts of more than 800 workers to rebuild the stadium, the site of a great number of human horrors when it served as the area’s largest shelter during the floods. This, my wife can’t understand. Why, she wonders, are we spending almost $150 million on a place to watch a football game when thousands are still without homes, their lives continually ravaged and grasping for a way to get back on their feet?
Wouldn’t that federal, state, and private funding be more apt to repair lives than a dome?
On the surface, that appears an almost nonsensical question to ask. But, I reasoned to her, if you watch the people’s reaction to the game, you start to have a different view. Over the past week, I’ve watched pieces that had Saints players Joe Horn and Reggie Bush touring the city’s ravaged edges, and the reaction they receive from the public is clear. These people who have been decimated so much over the past year are about to get the biggest distraction they could ask for. They are about to get their Saints back.
The 2-0 Saints, mind you, a team that has been re-energized and refocused with the presences of Drew Brees, Bush, and sudden big-time wide receiver Marques Colston. The Saints sold out every single game in the 68,354-seat dome — every one of those seats a season ticket after the team dropped package prices this offseason.
And so, I argued to her, it was $143 million well spent on the human spirit, an aspect that without, we have no more hope to be anything more than groaning drones, going about our daily ways until our inevitable time comes. Football is more important than ever in the city of New Orleans, more of a bonding effort than ever before.
I was satisfied with my stance.
But…
Yesterday morning on “Outside the Lines,” ESPN’s solid investigative show that it has yet found a way to screw up, Bob Ley interviewed a Tulane professor about what the Saints’ return meant to the city. It wasn’t so much the context of his point that was so shocking, but his response to Ley on how far he thought the city of New Orleans had come.
He responded that it had come a long way, and was hoping that the city could just survive this hurricane season. If we can make it to next season without being hit, he opined, by then the levees should be re-built, and New Orleans should be fine.
Excuse me?
Call me crazy, but if my family room wall comes down and takes away my entertainment system with it, I don’t go out and buy a new DLP before building another wall. And yet, in essence, that is what the city of New Orleans has chosen to do.
Granted, at an estimated cost of $10 billion, even what was sunk into the Superdome would have only helped produce a fraction of the monumental work that needs to be done in order to repair the levees. But are 800 people working around the clock down by the water to get this job done as quickly as the one that will house the Saints? This is also a team with an owner who still hasn’t made any promises that the Saints are long for the city.
And so tonight’s showcase, they say, will go a long way toward showing the rest of America that New Orleans still needs their support. It’s an avenue victims of Hurricane Rita, though, don’t have. Where are those people on the nation’s map?
Ley pointed out that despite the city’s population being cut in half, the area still suffers the same murder rate. So, what type of city has New Orleans become? Who stayed? Will it be known as the birthplace of jazz as it once was, or will the horrors of the Superdome post-Katrina be the unfortunate stigma of a once-great city?
All that, much like the ultimate destination of their football team, is up in the air for New Orleans residents. But tonight, at least, they take a huge step toward normalcy when the Saints take the field.
The human spirit in New Orleans may indeed be worth $143 million. But that doesn’t necessarily make it the best investment.