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.
