Meditation for August 6th, 2016
Olympian Clown Camp
Oh, good. The Olympics started yesterday in Brazil. The drama. The excitement. The world’s best athletes try and win gold. U.S. wants to have more gold than those pesky commies China and ex-commies, but still our main adversary, Russia. Hope Russia doesn’t cheat like last time.
The Olympics is a deplorable event. It displaces the poor for unusable infrastructure. The money that is made goes to businesses and the Olympic committee and not the poor. It makes the city go into billions of dollars of debt and all but one Olympic, Barcelona 1992, makes the city worse.
First off, how does a city even get into bidding for the Olympics? Well, a bunch of rich business owners get together with a bunch of government mucky-mucks and they spend the cities funds to entice the Olympian committee to want to host those doggone games there. You have to spend billions of dollars to possibly be told no.
They need to prove they can build the necessary pavilions where these games can be held. They need plumbing, sewage, housing for the athletes, pools, courts and other buildings. Most of these structures can’t be used for anything else after it is used, so this huge structure will just remain unusable and useful for anyone afterwards.
Crime and poverty will need to be addressed. Not the long term solution kind of way, but the hurried swept under the rug kind of way. The TV can’t be showing this horrible city where most of the population lives in complete poverty and shit and nothing that the Olympics is doing will benefit them at all. So move them and lock them up until NBC is out of view.
Then the city gets the Olympics so they have to spend a lot of money changing the entire city’s infrastructure to host a 14 day event. This isn’t chump change and this isn’t money that is waiting around to be used for Olympics only, this money comes from somewhere. It comes from taxes and business loans.
In U.S. dollars Sydney spent 4.7 billion
Athens spent 9 billion (total has never been verified)
Beijing spent 42 billion
London spent 11 billion
Rio has spent 15 billion so far and will spend more.
Rio is bankrupt already. Brazil is bankrupt and dealing with one of its worse recessions yet. The president is being impeached and removed from office. It needs money. It has a huge poverty and crime problem. They displaced thousands of poor to build their Olympic village. Rio spent 15 billion dollars and they have sewage infested water, body parts washing ashore, athletes getting kidnapped and housing that is made shittier than the huts in the surrounding flavelas.
The only people that make anything off of this is the businesses who made it, the TV networks that cover it and make billions off of advertising revenue, and the Olympic committee.
The athletes get fucked because other than a few athletes who get huge endorsements, and mostly those are from the good old USA, it is not lucrative to be really good at fencing. There is country pride and even a style of fighting with other countries to send athletes who can win. This starts to include doping and spending tax money on state of the art training facilities in countries that could use the money on better things.
The U.S. and the Soviet Union used to Cold War battle on the Olympic fields.
There is no compensation from the Olympic committee for anyone to compete at the Olympics.
The real losers are the people from the host country. They are displaced, brutally policed, hidden from the world and now live in a country billions of dollars poorer. That takes a lot of hope away. Some economists believe the 2004 Athens Olympics had a direct correlation to its failing austerity. The Olympics bankrupted the very country where this international event began.
How do we meditate on all of this? Stop watching it, social media-ing about it, and just don’t support the Olympics in any way. The bad outweighs the good by a truckload of gold medals.
If you really love Olympic sports, support them locally. There are gymnasts and swimmers who compete to just their parents every weekend. There are fencing and track & field meets that have empty stands. Just because you’re in America doesn’t mean you have to only watch the ball sports. You can go to any event you want. You do t need an Olymics to watch diving or sychronized swimming.
The Olympics are a corrupt nationalistic scam. Just watching it means you want poor people to suffer and rich people to keep getting richer. You only root for it because you are a patriotic drone.