After almost any kind of disaster, sports commentators and columnists speak of a sports team or league helping a community heal.
But, as The Town Talk in Alexandria reports, what if the disaster isn’t natural but man-made? What if the disaster includes the taking of human lives? What about Baton Rouge?
Can the LSU football team really help a reeling Baton Rouge community heal after a tumultuous July?
“Absolutely,” says Harry Edwards, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. “They have a great example in the New Orleans Saints after Katrina and that Super Bowl and what that effort of that team meant to that whole region.”
Maybe LSU football won’t bring healing to the families of Alton Sterling, Baton Rouge police officers Matthew Gerald and Montrell Jackson, and East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Deputy Brad Garafola.
Maybe LSU football’s part in the healing process is showing the Baton Rouge community a way forward.
“The fundamental thing,” Edwards says, “is to get it right. To know that in ages where you have burgeoning social movements that frame virtually everything and where even leagues are taking action in the social movements it becomes inescapable. They have to make sure they have their arguments correct.”
LSU football coach Les Miles didn’t have to worry so much about correct arguments after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. His school’s basketball arena was used as a triage area and a temporary morgue in those first chaotic days after Katrina made landfall. There was a common bond at the school of just helping people affected by the storm. Winning games could bring a distraction to the rebuilding process.
This month has been different.
In the early hours of July 5, Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was shot and killed by two white Baton Rouge police officers. Protests followed in Baton Rouge. Then, on the following Sunday, a 29-year-old black man from Kansas City, Missouri, shot and killed Gerald and Garafola, two white men, and Jackson, a black man.
“If I were a coach at LSU, as I told my good friend Dale Brown, I would talk to the team,” Edwards says. “The worst thing you can do is try to ignore it and act as if nothing is going on. The players are acutely aware of what is going on.”
The Town Talk has the full story.
