I've been working my touch off getting some overtime in at work so I won't have to worry about it in March when I'm away in Mexico so really, my brain is too fried right now for me to come up with something fresh, new, original and interesting to post here on my blog. So, I have just dug into the Zacharias Archives and pulled out this little gem from February 28 2010 when I was keeping a journal about the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I thought this might make interesting reading given that yesterday saw the closing ceremonies in Sochi, Russia.
I think I am nearing the fifth and final stage of grieving: acceptance. I have been through shock and denial, still wrestle with anger, I am no longer trying to bargain with God (please, please, please get those bloody Olympic tourists out of here and I promise not to swear at the next driver who cuts me off), and I seem to have gotten through depression okay.
Well, it isn't exactly acceptance, but I do like the pretty blue windbreakers that the Olympic volunteers are wearing, it has to be one of the purest blues outside of an unpolluted summer sky I have ever seen, and it is nice to see the joy and enthusiasm of the children, regardless of what I might think of their parents.
And I don't fault the Olympic volunteers, whom I mostly have come to regard as good-natured dupes, and they must have to put up with a lot. But I still think they're dorks. The weather too is lovely, giving us an early spring and no snow for the Olympics and this gets my schadenfreud going.
The crowds are inescapable, except in the early mornings before ten. After ten, they all emerge out of their hotel rooms nursing hangovers from the night before and then the streets are again unwalkable. It would be different, and perhaps interesting, if I found these people interesting (and yes, we are all interesting, each in our own way) but these people strike me primarily as consumers.
The bland and boring and socially conformist and politically reactionary or conservative middle to upper middle classes of mostly white people who have sold their souls at a profit hailing from wealthy countries or from the wealthy classes of poor countries. They have nothing to offer us here but their money, and why else would our elected leaders invite them here?
They seem to have little or no awareness or concern for the social cost of this ridiculous party, and how it is impacting on the quality of life in this city, especially for people on low incomes. To them we have no existence. Is it any wonder why they are not welcome here!
To me this is also indicative of social cleansing in action. We see here clogging our sidewalks only the very healthiest, financially well-healed and well-employed.
No working class trash in their numbers, no proles, but once you put enough alcohol into them (and, honey, it doesn't take much), you can't really tell the difference anyway.
These games are for the rich, and only for the rich. It's like that guy with the strange obsession for US Vice-President Joe Biden who got into the opening ceremonies on false credentials so he could get close to him. He was identified as an intruder primarily by the way he was dressed. He looked too poor to afford a ticket for this event. Social cleansing.
I am particularly struck by the displays of patriotism I see here on the streets and in stores, restaurants and cafes. The Canadian flag is being displayed, flown, worn, brandished and abused everywhere you look. It is even on display here in our own Vancouver Public Library and on one floor there are flags and red maple leafs everywhere. And I ask, why this overkill? Personally I have way too much respect for our flag to want to see it treated as wallpaper. What is this phenomenon of sudden and spontaneous mass patriotism? And is it really patriotism? Yes love of country and homeland is fine, and when not taken to extremes, probably a good thing. So what is the quality of this love of country that I see on display everywhere? Well, of course the nation is our place of belonging. The Spanish word for nation, "nacion", comes from the same root as the verb "nacer", which means to be born. So our sense of patriotism is really like a filial attachment to mother, our place of birth, our source of life. However, a nation isn't simply a piece of land, a geographical location. It is a collection of people. Yes, there is a curious alchemy of the people and the land together that also binds interestingly with history, but primarily is the nation the land or is it the people? Ask any Kurd whether he or she is Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian and Russian and they will look at you as though you are a complete moron. No matter where on God's Green earth they might happen to be at the time, they are Kurds. So then, even when we are not in Canada we are Canadian. It is the people that define the nation.
I will take this a step further. What is the point of saying that you love your country when you don't love the people who live there with you? Oh but the country is different from the people, you might answer. It is like when a friend of mine tried to warn me off from visiting Italy because, he said, it is full of Italians. (personally, I like Italians, by the way.)
Even so the patriotism that comes with all the enthusiastic shouting over our athletes and sports heroes and all the flag waving, while not necessarily bogus, it could well be misplaced? It is simply the reptilian brain working overtime, those subconscious, instinctive connections and links we experience with the land of our birth. This is also the seed of fascism, by the way, where excessive patriotism becomes the idolatry de jour and opens the way to authoritarian regimes, a beefed up militarism, trampled upon human rights and freedoms and perceived enemies of the state(aka people who know how to think independently) disappearing in the middle of the night. Remember this all of you who live in Canada, and those of you who don't but have been deluded into believing that this country is Heaven on Earth. History also tends to get revised or rewritten. I find it strange that only since our government began pouring billions of extra dollars into the military and the "Mission" in Afghanistan (want to know where all our dollars for affordable housing have gone?) that various approved media began to declare that the First World War had become Canada's defining moment of national identity. Oh? But nobody ever said, or even thought that, before 9-11. Curious, isn't it, how we reinvent the past in order to suit the needs of the present? But we still remain grievously cut off from one another. What is the point in celebrating and making earsplitting noise about how wonderful it is to be a Canadian, of how proud we are to be Canadians, while celebrating this absurdly expensive spectacle of the Olympics and forgetting entirely our fellow Canadians, poor, homeless and often Aboriginal who languish in Third World style squalor while the rest of us step over their sleeping bodies on the sidewalks on our way to the next sporting event or pavilion, bar or chi-chi restaurant? This is not patriotism, this is purely publicly-endorsed sociopathic behaviour.
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