Are You Ready For Some Football??

Halleujah! The Superdome in New Orleans is rebuilt at 75 million and Monday Night Football is coming to open it up again. This time there won’t be dead bodies out in the parking lot left to be picked up by a coroner that won’t come. There will be plenty of food and water available.

The rich and elite will pay good money to be seen. Local politicians will be out in force to lay claim to the political spoils of “reconstruction” from the damage of Katrina.

And the 9th Ward will still lie in ruins. FEMA trailers will still outnumber livable housing. Insurance companies will still continue to find more reasons not to pay the claims of the Katrina survivors than reasons to pay what they are responsible for paying.

The high mass of the religion NFL will be shown over millions of big screen, plasma screen, HDTV screens and just plain color screens and everybody will feel better about the folks of New Orleans. The horror scenes of black Americans being abandoned on highways, on rooftops and inside the “dome of doom” will be forgotten.

Its doubtful John Madden will remind Americans over 200,000 citizens of New Orleans remain displaced because the agencies responsible for helping them rebuild have been too busy trying to steal their properties for gentrification.

Monday Night Football doesn’t have to tell the nation about the elderly people who have given up hope and died. They don’t have to tell about the lack of mental health treatment for the trauma experienced by the survivors.

Are you ready for some football!!!

What a sick little scene will be played out on the floor of the stadium that a year ago held desperate people who weren’t important enough to save from the catastrophe everybody knew was coming.

But it’s the same story all over the world. The people of Iraq are forgotten. The people of Burma are hidden from sight. The genocide of Darfur is terrible but what can we do?

The other day in a restaurant I overheard a young guy saying we can’t pay everybody in the world like we do at Wal-Mart because it would be harmful to the economies of the poorer nations. This was his take on free trade agreements.

Imagine that!!!! Wal-Mart being thought of as a beacon of hope for the working person in the world is like saying soldiers with weapons meant to kill others are “peacekeepers”.

How absurd to think we should pay every person the same for doing the same work. Surely we can’t allow poorer economies to get stronger because it could upset the balance of power in which one percent of the population holds 80% of the wealth in the world. Surely we can’t allow the wealthy to take some responsibility for the 30,000 children dying each day from the effects of poverty.

The problem with caring is there are just so many to care about.

It’s just easier to see if Drew Brees can make a difference with the Saints, drink a Bud, a Coors and a Miller, eat twice as much as needed and buy a Reggie Bush jersey than to worry about starving kids, bombed kids, drowned kids or oppressed people.

Let’s play some football!!