Going A Round With The Greatest

With my wife, I have watched snippets of the 2010 Winter Olympics, enjoying parts of the opening ceremony and then later part of ice dancing where C&W and bluegrass music were featured (with other tributes to folk music native to local cultures, where it matches the home country of their dancers or contributes rather than distracts (a man pulling a woman's hair very offensive to females, according to an informal survey of locals in this conservative community)).  In our viewing and discussion with others in the community of what NBC has presented, we wonder about the timeliness of telling the average viewer, many millions without jobs, about the wealth and privilege of some of the elite athletes (Caribbean fun on a yacht, for instance).

What to do, what to do?  Do we say that we expect in the future we must pool all gifted athletes, rich and poor, as representatives of our country for international competitions?

I wish I could ask someone like Muhammed Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard or some new competitor like Steve Holcomb did s/he ever feel like they were regular people with non-elitist upbringings (Tanya Harding being an example that comes to mind for reasons that we remember all too well).

I want all of us - leaders, workers, business owners, politicians, elite/average, famous/unknown - to put aside our fear and anxiety that create emotionally-sensitive gulfs and...what?  See, that's the issue, isn't it?

There's a lot of pain we can and will talk about.  What can we do to turn the strength of our energy-draining emotions into positive, life-affirming attributes?

I will watch the leaders of this country in their showcase of bilateralism to produce tangible results, even for politicians obviously paid to play the age-worn, sworn enemy roles in boxing/skating smackdowns on television.  Any sign they will play par for the course (or claim bogus mulligans, to maintain this innersentence analogy), then I have no choice but to reach out for help from others in the international community to provide solutions we may not like in the short-term or, in my worst-case scenario, the long-term.

I am just one person.  I have no hierarchy that reports directly to me.  But, and I stress the importance of us as one people in only one global village, my unimportance is what matters most.  It is the absence of any one self that draws together and builds the desire of others to work around obstacles and make consensus-building solutions out of thin air.  A river will wear down a stone in the middle of the channel.  In other words, time is also unimportant.  Choose your postures carefully - many are watching who have no eyes you can see; many are listening who have no visible ears.  What was the famous quote the screenwriter put into the voiced/acted character of Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy?: "Were I to invoke logic, however, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."  Logic dictates we bypass self-centered careerists in business or politics to achieve greater goals than what narrow-minded leaders appear to promote.

I am a writer.  For me, there is only one direction I take - the pen is mightier than the sword.  I will not rest my verbose, virtual writing tool until we put "the people" first.  Politics is just a feel-good institutional implementation of our multifaceted, complex personality made of many, individually-important, subcultures.  Maintain that perspective and you, too, will find ways to heal our temporary, business-created aches and pains.  I, this primate image made of universal states of energy, belong to you.

Until we can find ways to help all of us, from feeding/clothing the homeless in Haiti to eliminating chronic inner city unemployment to providing jobs for people who still want to use their hearts, hands and heads for non-elitist/specialist job skills, I will not rest.  Be careful about creating too complex a global enterprise.  The difference between what an elitist calls a barbarian and what most of us call a good, motivated former factory worker is less than you think, almost miniscule, very much microscopic.