The way it always goes — Aaron Gordon's thoughtful comment about the Rio Olympics

© 2016 Peter Free

 

23 August 2016

 

 

The USA went home with the biggest bag of 2016 Olympic medals

 

And presumably Brazil weathered its critics' (arrogantly First World) skepticism.

 

So, all was pretty much well with Rio. Right?

 

 

Well no — but Brazil did not do anything that the rest of the world's elites do not also do

 

Astute sports reporter Aaron Gordon reflected that:

 

 

Something like $12 billion . . . five times the [total] annual minimum wage salary in Brazil—was spent on the Rio Games.

 

Nearly all of that money went to the already wealthy: developers, landowners, transportation moguls, massive—and allegedly corrupt—construction firms, effectively making the Olympics an enormously successful regressive wealth transfer program, taking money from the poor and middle class via taxes and giving it to the rich.

 

This is an unconscionable crime in a city with open sewers, endemic violence, abject poverty, and lack of economic opportunities for millions of its citizens.

 

The Olympics will continue to be unjustifiable for anyone who considers the lives of the impoverished or politically marginalized as worthwhile, worthy of the same basic human dignities as their own.

 

Of course, this will not stop the IOC [International Olympic Committee] from loudly trumpeting the Games as a vessel of healing, humanity and peace, all while members ride around in bulletproof cars, surrounded by armed guards.

 

© 2016 Aaron Gordon, The Rio Games were an unjustifiable human disaster, and so are the Olympics, Vice (22 August 2016) (extracts)

 

 

The moral? — This planet's only purpose, evidently, is to serve as a money machine for the influentially wealthy

 

I regularly focus on greed because it is so prevalent and societally damaging.

 

Most of us do not see avarice, even in ourselves. When we do, we shortsightedly justify it as an engine of progress. As if an agglomeration of uncontrolled wrongdoing can somehow make a good.

 

Therefore, I smile a bit, when pure capitalists go off on their self-justifying rants. There is no more immediate proof of someone's indecent stupidity.

 

By their own words, they mark themselves as enemies of Christ's principles. What more need one know about someone else's State of Soul?