The latest outrage of the day is some young black woman named Simone Biles who withdrew from Olympic competition on the US women’s gymnastics team after having a bad performance on one of the events. Apparently underperforming crushed her spirit and she couldn’t go on. Right now, the commentary is split between the Left declaring her a hero for stepping aside for her team and attending to her own mental health and the Right declaring her a coward for letting a bruised ego destroy her team’s chances of competing.
My take is, “There are still Olympics?
If we live in a time when the NFL, MLB and NBA have made it a point of honor to disrespect the flag and anthem, why would we bother watching supposed amateurs prepping for their futures by disrespecting the flag and anthem on the international stage. I understand that there are young people who spend their entire youths training and competing to be able to make it to the Olympic Games. And if they had a separate team just for people who still loved their country then I would be interested in cheering them on.
But as it stands, listening to how some lesbian soccer player or some angry black sprinter is spitting on the flag just doesn’t interest me anymore. I’m much more interested in my grandsons playing baseball or soccer or tennis. I’ll go way out of my way to see them playing hard and enjoying the games. In fact, I’m even more interested in the next time they come over and want to have a baseball catch. Then even I can pretend to be athletic, at least from the shoulder to the finger tips.
I wonder if I’m alone on this? I used to watch both the winter and summer games. In the summer games the boxing and the track events were the interesting things for me. Sure, I’d watch the swimming a little if we had a heavy hitter in the action. But I couldn’t really get too excited by women’s gymnastics. I think the scoring looked too rigged. In the winter games I’d watch the various skiing events and the speed skating. The figure skating suffered from the same problem as gymnastics. The scoring was too arbitrary. And the male figure skaters were just too obviously light in the loafers or skates as the case may be. But it was fun to watch how well the United States did in the medal count and the feeling of competition was infectious. And other than those black activists in 1968 for the most part the American Olympic athletes displayed heartwarming patriotism.
Well, that was then. This is now. My present attitude is, “I’ll care about professional sports and Olympic competition and poor immigrants and third world poverty and transgender adolescent mental health as soon as my government apologizes to me for adopting Critical Race Theory and jails the Antifa and BLM criminals who burned down the cities of America in 2020.
Until then enjoy your Olympics and professional sports and Hollyweird movies and anything you want me to help with “for the children.” I’ve got better things to do.