Please Do Not Watch The Winter Olympics
We are not going to watch any of it, nor write about it
either.
Why?
Well, I don’t care about the sports. You don’t either,
unless you follow them outside of the Olympics.
And you don’t.
I don’t care about the athletes. If you know one of them and
are rooting for them, great. But you don’t, and the only real reason you are watching
them is because they have flags for laundry.
The country you are from is, well, where your parents
banged. Not exactly a reason to care about someone more than someone else. It’s
all just laundry. Feel free to care for your country when it comes to politics
or trade or policy or whatever, but when it comes to which athletes are wearing
which flags while they play a sport that I could not care about? Hard pass.
So I *never* care about the Olympics… and then we add on to the fact that they are being held in a place where\
1) an active genocide may be happening (Uyghurs)
2) the free press is getting silenced (Hong Kong)
3) the environment is getting degraded (coal plants)
4) land is being made to infringe on the ocean rights of neighboring countries, regardless of the environmental impact (South China Sea)
5) the environment is getting degraded even more for this event (fake snow in a region that, um, does not get snow)
6) the freedom to point out any of this does not exist (great firewall)
7) Team Virus will win (because Team Virus has won at every Olympics)
Now, I get that everyone in the United States lives in a glass
house, stone-wise. There’s nothing being done to the Uyghurs that this country
did not do (possibly with multipliers) to the indigenous and African Americans.
The free press is taking it on the chin around the globe. If a country had the
ability to make more land, they would.
But none of that gets tied to having to watch people play
sports on various forms of frozen water, just because you have a flag on your
chest.
Stop the Olympics! We’ll all be glad you did.
1 comment:
I like the Olympics, particularly the Winter ones. I like them because, as you point out, the sports themselves are not worth watching throughout their respective "seasons" year in and year out (hockey notable exception). They are compelling...once every four years. That's it. "Curling Night in America" every Friday night? No. Curling every four years? Love it. And I'll never tire of the drama surrounding figure skating and in particular the inherent cat-fight mentality of the women's competition. Figure skating gave us Tonya Harding as well as the Canadian Screw Job in the pairs, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I'm unusual in that: I'm fine with non-Americans winning, and in fact quite often root for such an outcome. Every country deserves to have their underdog story come true; we don't have exclusive rights to that.
To it being in China: agree with everything you say, but my watching or not watching isn't changing any of that. So...I need something to watch this Feb!
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