Ideals

Most of the Olympic games distracts you from what's supposed to be the true mission of the whole enterprise. It's a big money-making endeavor sponsored by businesses like Coca-Cola and McDonald's. Professionals compete in many of the sports. Performance enhancing-drugs and other such gamesmanship will never be completely absent from the thing. You hear people on television rhapsodizing about the ideals of sport, and it just sounds sappy.

It's true even in spite of everything, or at least I think so. I believe in what the Olympics does, or what it can do. I believe in the importance of sports to help us always strive to push further out the physical limits of the human body. Why should we only seek to improve ourselves by means of intellect? The species ought always to be growing stronger, faster and capable of leaping higher. There's a lot of side show, but the Games do that.

They also help us grow together as nations. It's hard if not impossible to strip global and social politics away from the encounters with other countries that we have there, but I think that we really do foster more positive  bonds than what comes from the United Nations or NATO. It's just got to be harder to hate someone when you meet and compete alongside someone. I like to think of people from different countries learning from one another and sharing things.

That all probably sounds very naive and I suppose it must not be all true. They're called ideals, not realities. What's supposed to be very telling about the idea of Utopia is that it translates as "No Place". I think I read that somewhere. Anyway, maybe that's one more area where we can always aim to do better: actually fulfilling our best intentions instead of just spouting off a lot of nice words and then letting baser ideas take over.