International Agenda

The Olympic opening ceremonies begin tomorrow night. It will probably be watched by more than 50 million viewers, and then we will stay tuned for the next couple of weeks as the best athletes from every country in the world competes to be the best in the world. Even countries that are starving or communist or don't have electricity pull together enough money to fund sending an amazing team of athletes to compete against places like Russia and the US and Canada, who have plenty of money and goods to train for this event constantly. I think back to the time of Ceaser, when he proclaimed that games would be played for 160 days straight. One hundred and sixty days, he expected all the citizens of Rome to come out and wrestle, run, leap and challenge each other. This was, of course, a ploy to distract from the possibility that maybe he wasn't such a great leader, but it was still an important part of the development of the Olympic games.

Now they are played every two years- Summer and Winter, in cities that begin fighting for them a decade or more in advance, and then spend millions preparing to hold people from literally every place you can think of. Italy has it this year, and I like to think that it truly does promote world peace. Whenever I think back to what I have heard about the 1972 Olympics and the Steven Spielburg movie that came out about it "Munich" I worry that if we continue the fight we are having with the Middle East, some incident of that sort will happen again. It's frightening to think about how world politics could affect something that at face value seems to be about the strength of the body and grit of the mind, events that are symbolic of the limits one can push one's self to achieve a dream, a goal. I wonder if it's genetic or if we are all born with the capability of pushing ourselves and then lose it as some things become easier and others become more difficult and are eventually dropped. Thinking about how to become something great is overwhelming, so I prefer to look at it as a chance to push myself in a way that is beneficial to everyone around me.

I would love to attend the Olympics at some point. They were in Atlanta in 1996 but I was too young then to appreciate the meaning behind the Olympics. And, since there was a bomber there, it wasn't as successful a message as I'm sure the committee wanted. Whenever people think about the 1996 summer Olympics, I guarantee you they can barely remember the names of the people who won gold, but they can remember the incident that killed several people and injured more in Olympic park, the incident that would lead our country into a fear of terrorism, a fear that most people didn't even realize they had until September 11, 2001. I was actually reading an article last night that wondered whether, eventually, people would begin celebrating it as a holiday or rememberance. If it would suddenly mean that banks and post offices would be closed on the second Monday of September, schools would have two three-day weekends in a row. It seems sad, but isn't that what we have done when we "remember" Martin Luther King, Jr., or Memorial Day? Isn't that all about tragedies that have become immortal through Hallmark and the American government. I'm not saying they're working together, but card companies always seem to jump on that sort of thing. As a joke once, Boyfriend gave me a card congratulating me on becoming an American citizen.

Hopefully, as the winter Olympics span global TV networks and we silently cheer from our couch or chair for Michelle Kwan or Andy Finch or any of the other amazing athletes that will exhibit their skill on the ice and in the snow, we can move away from the view of foreigners as foreigners and instead marvel that during a time when civil and international wars rage across our world, we can break for a few weeks to push and cheer for our own as well as other countries athletes.