Last week, I was incensed after learning the Sugar Bowl would only be postponed a day after a horrific tragedy in the host city, New Orleans.

15 families were planning funerals. 30 other families were wondering if they’ll need to plan funerals. It’s just a game, not our national honor. I think we would’ve shown more honor by respecting the grief of the mourners. A week was not too much to ask.

Many of my friends agreed. Some, like me, were primarily concerned with the grief of the survivors. Others worried about safety concerns. Still others were repelled by the thought money was the guiding factor in the decision.

I’ll admit I was shocked at friends who just thought we should push forward and pass the ball. It’s not that I don’t share their unwillingness to capitulate to terror. I’ve long been of the mind that we need to be defiant, resolute and kick ass in our response to barbarism.

It’s in our American DNA not to back down. After 9/11, we didn’t. Our president climbed on the ruins of New York’s World Trade Center with a megaphone and screamed our defiance to the universe. We went to war, albeit on shaky-if-not-false pretenses. We scooped terrorists off of battlefields and imprisoned them, albeit with a lack of precision.

We did all these things and I applauded. In column after column, radio show after radio show, television appearance after television appearance, I championed the war, the administration and Guantanamo. For the most part, with some misgivings but with the knowledge that our hearts were in the right place-the don’t screw with Americans place, I supported the response to 9/11.

And I still do. But guess what happened after 9/11?

Football, and pretty much every other sport, went dark for the week. Unlike 1963 when games were played 48 hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the NFL realized that grief needed a buffer, and the second week of the season was canceled. This is what player Amani Toomer said at the time:

“You’re in your 20s, you think the moon and stars rise and fall with how well you do in a football game. Then you get totally sidetracked — there’s a real world that has nothing to do with the NFL.”

At the time no one said “we need to play these games to show the terrorists who we really are.” If they did, no one listened. There was this crazy idea that our humanity was not measured by the chains on a football field. It’s measured, millimeter by millimeter, in empathy.

To me, a society that mistakes arrogance for resilience is not a society that understands what resilience means.

At this point the issue is moot — the game has been played, the winner taking a step toward playing for the national championship. And the people who support it say, “Life goes on.”

I agree that life does, indeed, go on. If it didn’t, if we were paralyzed at every dark moment in our personal or national histories, there would be no point in getting out of bed. It’s an empty phrase, to be honest.

But there are certain things that, because of their relative importance in the grand scheme of things, don’t deserve to take precedence over compassion and respect for grief. The way that a society treats its members at their most vulnerable moments, when they are burdened with sorrow or bent over in pain, defines our character.

Playing a football game, however important, can never trump pausing to remember the victims of a tragedy. Holding the Sugar Bowl before the bodies are buried leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers