Of Course, You Postpone the Sugar Bowl
postpone the sugar bowl
There is a certain and not unimportant aspect of life in general and tragedy in particular, in understanding you can’t grieve forever. But leave it to the squeaky wheels of the online gimme-gimmes to skip over “can’t grieve forever” and press on to stepping over the bodies to get our sportsball on schedule, damn you.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill weighed in on the postponement of the Sugar Bowl game after a deadly attack in New Orleans on Wednesday.
Murrill told NBC News that she believes the game should be postponed to Friday. The game has been pushed back just one day to Thursday afternoon so far.
“Not my decision, but I would like to see it delayed at least another day. If they asked my opinion, I would tell them that,” Murrill said. “I think that it was wise to delay it at least a day. This is an active crime scene, and they just finished removing some of the bodies, and they still haven’t removed all of them. I still think we need to wait an extra day.”
Murrill added that she believes the community is “safe,” regardless. The number of victims killed in the Bourbon Street attack has risen to 15, Fox News has learned…
…Conservative commentator John Ziegler also expressed disagreement with the postponement in a post on X.
“This is wrong. Postponing the Sugar Bowl one day will not do anything to bring back those who lost their lives, or make the game any safer. In fact, [it] gives the terrorists exactly what they wanted. We have become SO soft as a society in nearly every way,” Ziegler wrote.
“The ‘you can never be too safe’ people seem to pretend that there are no residential costs for postponing an event of the magnitude of the Sugar Bowl. Tens of thousands of people have traveled to New Orleans with no hotel for tomorrow night, or flight reservations for Friday.”
For the uninitiated, that would be the John Ziegler that was subject to this excellent David Foster Wallace treatment on talk radio, and more famous for his Jerry Sandusky-Joe Paterno apologia crusade.
While folks who spent big money for a big college football game in travel, tickets, and time invested is a consideration and a sympathetic circumstance, such thoughts are secondary to the issue at hand. The theme of social media is how disposable income is used, and the loss of that income spent on this game is indeed going to pinch the involved parties. Travel arrangements become a nightmare; airlines and hotels get overwhelmed, and their policies will be scrutinized. Social media will have a field day with sob stories and angry, inconvenienced fans.
They can take it up with customer service. Meanwhile, in the real world, New Orleans the city just had a massive, mass casualty terror attack. The dead have no such recourse of complaining about inconvenience. The active crime scene investigation is nearly three city blocks long in one of the most famous streets in all the world. The resources required to make a 70K+ people football game go off without a hitch just are not there within the same time frame. Many of those same resources just had their worst workday in years, and a long and early one at that. Not to mention, New Orleans is hosting the Super Bowl at the same venue in 38 days. Getting a better plan for that looming, even bigger football game and potential target is of paramount importance.
“Don’t let the terrorist win” is a fine statement of defiance. Makes for a wonderful rallying cry. Postponing a football game 24 hours is not letting the terrorist win, especially a terrorist shot full of holes and who was also lying dead in the street for a good part of the day as the investigation unfolded. No, nothing we do with the football game is going to “bring anyone back” or change what has happened. What does need to happen is a thorough, unrushed investigation that isn’t hampered and hamstrung by authorities pushing to get the mess cleaned up in time to look good on tv. That’s far more dishonorable to the victims who will never get justice in this world – for there is no justice for what happened on Bourbon Street – but at least deserve our best effort in getting the story right of why and how they died and/or were injured. The city and country deserve those answers as well. Postponing the Sugar Bowl for 24 hours is more than reasonable. That doesn’t make anyone “soft”; it makes them prudent.
Folks losing out on travel time and money, and folks having to wait 23 hours for a football game, can say it isn’t fair. It is not fair. Neither is getting mowed down by a homicidal terrorist on a street that has been romanticized as the place for good times and no worries. The only fair in this world is the one where you go to pay your money to ride the rides and judge the best goat and cow in the county. In this world there be monsters, and one of those monsters got loose in New Orleans, costing 15 people their lives. We can do the big celebration of life and moments of silence and all the rest when the Sugar Bowl finally does kick off. It can wait.
