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Ok

So I was trying to come up with a sassy title. I don't know if i was successful or not. But i wanted to put some feelers out there and see where people stood on this Olympics in China thing.

As you may have heard there have been several large protests along the Olympic Torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco. People are using the visibility of the Olympic torch running around the world as an opportunity to stage protests. I can't say that I'm all that mad about it either.  In light of China's history of human rights abuses, their involvement in Darfur, and their occupation of Tibet I'm surprised it's happening there at all. 

But then in light of our history of human rights abuses, government involvment in the media  and occupation of...say... oh i don't know, Puerto Rico, Iraq, and every other location we have a military presence in, I'm surprised we get to do a lot of things too.  But thats just my two litte centavitos. 

However it is not the first time the olympics have been used as a
platform for folks political messages. We have 1968, Tommie Smith and John Caros performing the Black Power Salute, then being stripped of their medals, and the Atlanta 1996 bombing, whose purpose according to dude who planted the bomb was to embarrass the US government about their support of on demand abortions. 

Somehow, i don't think the US governemt is ever embarrassed about much of anything. 

Hmmm. The olympics are not the place for politics? Then why has no South American or African country ever hosted an Olympics? And why did they sue the "Gay Olympics" for using the word olympics in their name? 

It's all really interesting and all these facts are realy random I know, i wasn't sure what i was going to write about, then I found a Wikipedia entry on the olympics and found all these interesting things. Who knew, that an organization as "unpolitical" as the Olympic committee had such a political history? 

It's all pretty complicated. And it makes me wanna sit down with a bottle of two buck chuck and watch George Lopez to be honest. It happens everytime i hear the word "politics" these days.  What does that really MEAN anyway? I want to bang my head against something when I hear it. 

I mean i'm not really sure how I feel about the Olympics. As a kid all I ever liked watching was the swimming stuff,which is forever in my mind traumatically equated with those manish East German "women".I dig the ice skating which i would try to imitate on the hard wood floors by spraying them down with pledge then running across them in socks. 

I guess this is kind of a symptom of my larger attitude about politics in general.
I know what I'm for, so why do i need to argue with people and pit myself in opposition to them based on what I'm against? I get tired of talkin about us and them, and evil multinational corporations, and evil dictators, and focusing on all the shit that's wrong with the world, or analyzing interviews with Barack to find the patriarchal racist undertones of every fucking question. 

Is it a surprise the world is such a mess when all we focus on is the messed up shit? 

I have a suggestion.

Turn off the TV. Put down the newspaper, get a cup of coffee, i don't give a dam if it's organic or fair trade or what, but get a cup of coffee and take a walk and smile to 5 people on the way.  It doesnt matter if they smile back.

Find a flower, or a blade of grass, wherever it may be growing, be it a garden or a crack on the side of the freeway, find a sign of life, outside of your ego self, contemplate it for a few minutes. And say thank you for it. Say thank you that there is something else living in the world besides you. Get out of your head, get out of your mind  open your eyes a little wider and notice, that there is beauty everywhere. You just have to look for it. 

I think we forget about that sometimes. I'm not saying to bury your head like an ostrich and ignore other peoples ills and suffering, but worry, and anger, and fear...ain't doing nothing to make nothing better.

Anyway, I'm out.

Chew on that for sec, let me know what you think.

-m