Bread and Circuses

For the next ten or so days the most important news item in Canada will most likely be the Olympics. Which from my perspective is a shame. I could not care less about the Olympics for a number of reasons.

1) I don't like watching sports on TV. I can respect the passion, the effort and the extraordinary athletic skill that the individuals bring to their event. I can admire their courage and their commitment to get to where they are this week. But it is boring to watch. It is a passive activity that at best (unless one is related to the athlete) allows the watcher to, for a brief moment in time, suspend their own life - replacing it with the glories and/or crushing defeats of another's. It allows one to live vicariously when our own lives feel incomplete.

2) I resent the expectations that all Canadians will be cheering for their country's athletes. Just because of some accident of birth that someone was born in the same country as I was does not give me the right to gain status because they place well in a competition. If the Olympics was truly about skill and sportsmanship - it shouldn't matter when someone came from. If the Olympics in anyway bind the country together it is because for a ten day period the collective mass can forget about the chaos of our lives. For ten days we can pretend that there are not issues that need to be addressed and that for the most part - we don't have a clue how to do it.

3) Sports are not news. For the next ten days not the national newscasts be rescheduled to some inconvenient hour so that everyone can watch repeats of the "important" performances of completions deemed to be interesting. And the lead story in the national newscast will be the Olympics and which country has won the most medals and why Canada is/is not doing as well as expected. It is hard, if not impossible to believe that there are not more important stories both domestically and internationally. To repeat - sports are not news.

4) the amount of money that is being spent on the Olympics is obscene. While we will perhaps never know the actual cost, numerous sources are suggesting that the games in Sochi may cost the Russian people 50 billion dollars. We will never know how much money Canada or other developed countries spends on training, transporting and supporting their athletes but the total surely is measured in the millions and millions  of dollars.  

At the same time there are over two million Syrian refugees desperate for help - for a place to live safely and place for their kids to go to school. According to the World Bank (not a source I would normally use) "approximately 1.2 billion people remained entrenched in destitution in 2010"; and as stated in a report prepared by World Hunger Education Service "the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012."

We have better places to spend our money. If the developed countries of the world had ignored the Olympics and contributed half of the total money spent getting ready for the games - we could have given every mother good pre-natal care and sent every kid to school - in the entire world.

One really has to wonder why the governments want us to focus on the circus and ignore the painful reality of so many people's lives. A cynic would perhaps suggest that one can hide the lies easier when the people are distracted.