Why, Drew?

Written by Chris Rose, this reflects what's in my heart about Drew's choice of endorsing a hate group:

“Oh, Drew. Why, Oh fucking why? I speak for myself and no one else but, godammit Drew: I am old and beat down but there beats in my chest still the heart of a 10-year-old boy who loves sports and nostalgia and heroes and I get goosebumps when I walk through a stadium tunnel and see for the first time the green field below and my eyes go wide as saucers and the roar of the crowd washes over me and I cry when the National Anthem comes on and I have been in that number that cheers you, loves you -- truly, madly, deeply.

And I'm not saying politics has no place in sports, nor that sports no place in politics. It's all an open marketplace of ideas, platforms for social change, education, enlightenment, progress. At its best, sports is healing, a unifier, a community, as we all witnessed after Katrina.

But I am lamenting more than I can even articulate how down right surprising, shameless and shitty is your endorsement of the mission of Focus on the Family, one of the most hateful, prejudiced, divisive, repugnant organizations in our country.

Maybe you weren't aware of their agenda: Convert, ban, deport or imprison the gays. Not much in their platform about climate change, health care, economic equality, international diplomacy or even shortening the NFL preseason. It's just about hate. And you signed on And that sucks.

Actually, it hurts. Because somewhere in the dregs of my sorry soul there is that little boy who looks at guys like you as heroes.

Maybe you didn't know what you were getting into. Maybe you have your own blithe and naïve streak of We Are The World in you. Maybe you didn't realize that when you became a spokesman for Focus on the Family, you became a free agent for hate, prejudice and division.

Drew, I hope none of your kids are gay. Because you just endorsed the worst thing that could happen to them. An organization that will stop at nothing to humiliate, degrade and disregard them. In the name of Jesus. And Drew Brees,

Look, man, I got no brook with bringing Bibles to school Do it every day. Like weed and weapons -- just keep them in your back pack and don't use them to intimidate, frighten, delegitimize, alienate or lord over (pun intended) other classmates.

Unless that is, of course, you're cool with the other students insisting that your kids take some time to read the Torah, the Qoran or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Although, actually, that would be cool. Imagine children with open minds discovering the infinite fields of thought, exploring the vistas of the intellect and imagination.

Or imagine a hateful self-proclaimed "Christian" movement to eradicate the perceived heathens in their midst; Jews, Muslims, Hindus, gays, lesbians, trans....and the still undecided among their ranks.

Since you have made your statement, I will make mine: Using your celebrity, fame and standing in this community to endorse the agenda of Focus on the Family is a slap in the face, a poke in the eye and a kick in the balls of anyone who believes in tolerance, unity, community, science, love and freedom.

It sucks to see this. Just fucking sucks. I don't have a lot of sports heroes who are younger than me. Cal Ripken Jr., Simone Biles. Serena Williams, Colin Kaepernick and you, to name a few. But I am unsure now.

I've done my own wrongs -- too many to recount here. I've stumbled, fallen, made mistakes that rive my soul and pound my skull at night. I'm a flat-out colossal fuck up. I've hurt people. A lot of them. But I can say this with dignity: It was never in the name of hate.

I've got my own work to do, my amends to make. But I welcome into my community and my life anyone with honest beliefs, good intentions, a kind heart and a willing to listen, understand and tolerate.

On a final note, I would be remiss if I didn't thank you for building a football field and installing lights at my kids' high school. And for the so many boosts and joys you have given this community. But when you align yourself with the entrenched and bitter haters, the accusers, the science deniers, the willfully ignorant, the prejudiced, the judgmental, the divisive, the hypocritical and the persecutors, well.....you acted upon your own beliefs.

I suppose. I can respect that.

But not you. Not now. But go Saints still, now, forever. Because I'm still that stupid little kid who loves the love of the game and Sundays in the fall and inevitable heartbreak that it means to be a member of the Who Dat Nation.” - Chris Rose

September 4, 2019

Finally, the Tenth Anniversary is Over

It's been a whirlwind of remembering ten years ago: TV, Radio, Internet, Books.

But people who lived through, witnessed the storm and the aftermath, don't feel happy about all of the hoopla. Only Chris Rose can described how we feel.

Taken from the website Vice, is a Chris Rose original:


August 29, and Hurricane Katrina has reached critical mass in New Orleans.

But when I tell you about a storm hitting south Louisiana right now, I am not talking about August 29, 2005, the day that wet, wide mess of a storm whipped across our coast and kicked our asses.

This is not a reenactment, a retrospective, nor a documentary. This is now. Right now, today, the howling, gale force winds are blowing hard down here and the flooding is catastrophic, again.

The flooding is of memories in this town, none of them good, some of them haunting people to the brink of collapse, like the levees. The hard winds of emotion are reducing some residents to fits of agony. The "remembrances" and "observations" and "celebrations" from that time and since are so intense that some residents have packed up and left town this weekend to get away from the media maelstrom and relentless sorrowful nostalgia that is now filed under the name: Katrina, Ten Years After.

Related: The Lower Ninth Ward,Ten Years After Katrina

OK, this is also a time of metaphors gone wild around here. Of total loss of perspective. Of holding on tight, to something or someone—anything or anyone. I am no less guilty of that than any other.

New Orleans is an all-Katrina, all-the-time carnival of excess right now. Every newspaper headline. Every talk show. Every art gallery, playhouse, even every nightclub because every band has a Katrina song. Some have entire albums.

All the famous people are here, from presidents to the pundits. The American fetishizing of anniversaries has hit this town like a Category 5. And although you can look around and see a city standing tall and tough, physically—with all our new hotels and hospitals and malls and even our new levees—the damage here now, at this most poignant date on the Gulf Coast calendar, is emotional, psychological, and just plain mental.

It's not to say that these are not better days in New Orleans—the Crescent City, the Big Easy that isn't so big and never was as easy as most folks think. Our economy is ripping. The recession of the past ten years was, for us, a windfall. We got so much federal, corporate, and charitable money that no one in the world has any idea exactly how much.

We have a lot to be thankful for. We have, for the most part, blossomed into that big, bright, beautiful, rebuilt, reborn, and re-imagined shining city on the hill. Except for the hill part. There are no hills here. But you get the point.

Numbers tell the story: In fiscal year 2014, the city collected over $46 million in revenue from hotel occupancy fees, and this year is on pace to be even higher. According to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau (NOCVB), 9.52 million people laid their heads down to rest in our 39,000 hotel rooms last year—both of those the largest numbers on record.

And here's a fetcher for you: Prior to Hurricane Katrina, there were 809 restaurants in the city of New Orleans. Now, there are 1,408. Of course, since I started writing this story, two or three more probably hit the market.

I mean, everyone knows we love to eat down here. But 600 more restaurants than before? With 10 percent fewer residents?

This country is hungry for some New Orleans right now, to be sure.

According to Katrina 10, a Rockefeller Foundation think tank and the city's primary source for economic statistics and analysis, New Orleans is among the most vibrant small business environments in the country now.

"Entrepreneurial activity in New Orleans is 56 percent above the national average, painting a rosy picture for the business climate," reads one recent analysis. "Fueled by an engaged community, strong financial incentives, and an unmatched culture, one of the fastest growing startup hubs has grown out of the recovery of New Orleans."

The publisher of Forbes magazine described the city's economic growth since Katrina as "one of the great turnarounds in American history."

So, like I said, these are better days. We should be walking on sunshine, right?

And many are. Lots of folks—maybe even most—are feeling just fine around here about what this city has become. It's cleaner, smarter, and prettier—if that were possible.

But it's also still a dangerous place to walk around at night in some neighborhoods. And beyond the veneer of national coverage, we have more broken streetlights than some cities our size have streetlights, total. Our streets—paved upon a wet, sinking foundation—are in a constant state of upheaval (literally, not metaphorically).

And the truth is, for all the tax dollars this country has poured into rebuilding our levee system—the previous incarnation of which collapsed the first time it was ever tested and killed 1,600 of us—we have no idea if the new one works. There is no way to know if it will work until millions of pounds of water get hurled into the rock again like last time.

We are living now, as we lived before all this, on blind faith.

So for all the good and bad, we flutter back and forth about what terminology is appropriate for this occasion that looms over us. Is it an anniversary? A remembrance? Mourning? Observation? Celebration? Eulogy? Commemoration? You tell me: What are you calling it?

Truth is, they're all appropriate. In a larger communal sense, this is a time to raise a toast to the triumph of the human spirit and a recognition of the resilience of the people of New Orleans. But there is a strong undercurrent bubbling up this weekend, flushed out by the endless stream of imagery and remembrance and observation and celebration and media lights shining down on us, which has some folks running for cover.

And not the metaphorical kind. Wounds have been re-opened here. Scabs ripped away. Memories a lot of people had managed to escape for ten years have come flooding back like, well... a flood. (I warned you!)

Like I said, it is the anniversary of metaphors, ten years since Katrina, the glorification of which we have managed to avoid for, well, ten years.

There are many here wishing hard and fast for this to go away, for the date to pass, for the attention to wane, for the conversations to switch to the weather, the Saints, the elections, anything but this.

Jesus, even Donald Trump would be a welcome distraction.

We here are stuck in an endless cycle of Katrina—a name many here still refuse to speak. And despite the profound, inescapable and triumphant leaps of recovery and rebirth we have experienced, there's no two ways about it: This is tough as shit to go through again, to relive on a local level the exposure of our national nightmare and disgrace.

To see how far we have come yet how far we still need to go. It's a national discussion being played out in a city of lore that looms large in the American imagination but is actually, truthfully, a pretty small town. Considering.

Nevertheless, New Orleans is shouldering once again the burden of our unfinished—and in some cases unstarted—national conversations. Race. Poverty. Income Inequality. Energy. Rising seas. Loss of the wetlands.

And that's fine. We love conversation down here. We love talking as much as we love eating. In fact, all we talk about when we're eating is what we're going to eat next.

But I stray. Everyone here has a story to tell. And over this weekend, unless you unplug, disconnect, and go off the grid, you just might hear every one of them. But we're OK. We're gonna make it. And we're gonna stay here and keep making our way through this wild ride, trying to find our way back home.

There is nowhere else for us to go—even though many in the media, clergy and Congress told us we should find another place ten years ago. But maybe they have learned, at long last, at this most painful and triumphant juncture, what we here have always known: The longer you live in New Orleans, the more unfit you become to live anywhere else.

That's the one true crazy thing about all this. Here, at the nation's first geographical front against disaster, subsidence, evaporation and extinction: We're still here, ya bastards.

Chris Rose is a New Orleans-based freelance writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the New York Times bestseller 1 Dead in Attic.some aspects.

Katrina Memories Website

Called "Love, Write, Light", this website contains and will accumulate first person stories of Hurricane Katrina victims. It is a crowdsourcing campaign in anticipation of Katrina’s anniversary. Funds raised will be used to help light up statues erected in 17 locations, called “evacuspots,” around the city, so they’re visible 24 hours a day. People needing help in evacuating are supposed to gather at those spots. This is the brainchild of the website Evacuteer.org .

What originally brought me to this site was a piece written by a writer who resides in New Orleans, Chris Rose .

Chris is loved by many, not loved by a some due to his personal problems after Katrina. He wrote articles in the post-Katrina world that are contained in his book "One Dead In Attic" .

Here is his letter to America in the weeks following Katrina:

"Dear America,

I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We’re South Louisiana.

We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we never were much for waiting around for invitations. We’re not much on formalities like that.

And we might be staying around your town for a while, enrolling in your schools and looking for jobs, so we wanted to tell you a few things about us. We know you didn’t ask for this and neither did we, so we’re just going to have to make the best of it.

First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses and the men and women of your National Guards, fire departments, hospitals and everyone else who has come to our rescue.

We’re a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don’t cotton much to outside interference, but we’re not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it.

Just don’t get carried away. For instance, once we get around to fishing again, don’t try to tell us what kind of lures work best in your waters.

We’re not going to listen. We’re stubborn that way.

You probably already know that we talk funny and listen to strange music and eat things you’d probably hire an exterminator to get out of your yard.

We dance even if there’s no radio. We drink at funerals. We talk too much and laugh too loud and live too large and, frankly, we’re suspicious of others who don’t.

But we’ll try not to judge you while we’re in your town.

Everybody loves their home, we know that. But we love South Louisiana with a ferocity that borders on the pathological. Sometimes we bury our dead in LSU sweatshirts.

Often we don’t make sense. You may wonder why, for instance – if we could only carry one small bag of belongings with us on our journey to your state – why in God’s name did we bring a pair of shrimp boots?

We can’t really explain that. It is what it is.

You’ve probably heard that many of us stayed behind. As bad as it is, many of us cannot fathom a life outside of our border, out in that place we call Elsewhere.

The only way you could understand that is if you have been there, and so many of you have. So you realize that when you strip away all the craziness and bars and parades and music and architecture and all that hooey, really, the best thing about where we come from is us.

We are what made this place a national treasure. We’re good people. And don’t be afraid to ask us how to pronounce our names. It happens all the time.

When you meet us now and you look into our eyes, you will see the saddest story ever told. Our hearts are broken into a thousand pieces.

But don’t pity us. We’re gonna make it. We’re resilient. After all, we’ve been rooting for the Saints for 35 years. That’s got to count for something.

OK, maybe something else you should know is that we make jokes at inappropriate times.

But what the hell.

And one more thing: In our part of the country, we’re used to having visitors. It’s our way of life.

So when all this is over and we move back home, we will repay to you the hospitality and generosity of spirit you offer to us in this season of our despair.

That is our promise. That is our faith."

As a follow-up to that letter, read his letter written 10 years later.


Chris Rose can be reached at noroses@bellsouth.net.

Seeds of Revolution