Note: While the idea of the finest athletes from all over the world competing for prizes is wonderful, and should serve as a magnificent symbol of human achievement and cooperation, more and more the Olympics throw a cracked, ugly mirror up to our collective shadow.
As I walk around Bloomington with my puppy Shadow, I’m always amazed that people still want to put up bloated buildings for private use. Don’t they recognize the resource extraction required by every beam, every brick, every stone? Don’t they feel the violation that Earth absorbs each time we dig into her skin and take her blood (oil and gas), each time we excavate her bones (stones, coal, precious and other metals), each time we wipe out and pollute what grows and flows upon her (trees, plants, rivers)? I really am astonished to see/feel the myopia that still shrinks people’s perceptions to the point where, not only are they not sensitive to Mother Earth’s pain, they don’t even feel their own body’s pain — until it overwhelms, at which point they radiate, poison, or cut out the offending part and/or “take” something to “kill” the pain.
Last Friday, when I told my new veterinarian about living in a 20-foot diameter yurt in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a life style I thoroughly enjoyed for about 15 years — “I am one of the original tiny house people,” I told him — he replied that he wishes his wife would recognize that the $600/month heating bills that they pay to reside in a house of which only two rooms they really use, is unnecessary. He wants to downsize. Simplify. But like most? Americans, apparently his wife doesn’t really grok what he’s talking about. At least not yet.
And then there are the grandiose public venues, of which the Olympics is the most blatant example. Not only do these venues not bring about the promised “prosperity” to the cities that host them —
An Economic Myth of Olympic Proportions
— they also serve as iconic graveyards for unrealized post-Olympic dreams.
What Abandoned Olympic Venues Look Like Today
That’s not even considering what becomes of impoverished people who happen to live where Olympic venues are built.
The Olympic Juggernaut: Displacing the Poor from Atlanta to Rio
Nor does it cover how this year Russian doping has been demonized by the MSM press —
Russian doping: An extraordinary attack on the integrity of sport and the Olympic games
— as if other countries aren’t doing the same thing . . .
Doping at the Olympic Games
Yep, even the Olympics becomes a player in the geopolitical chess match pitting the desperate, rapidly fading U.S. hegemon against just about everybody else but targeting as usual, big bad Russia, as the bogey man.
