Last night as I was making the greatest homemade clam chowder in the history of man, I was semi blinded by the sight of the Olympic torch passing by one block over and clearly visible from my kitchen widow. There were a lot of lights, some guy screeching into a loud speaker, and several parade like floats in front of and behind the runner. Let me just tell you how much the whole fucking spectacle pissed me off.
A lot.
Let’s just put it into context, shall we? The Olympics will cost us approximately 6 BILLION DOLLARS. Not millions, I said BILLIONS. Using the common short scale as we do in North America 1 billion dollars equates to a thousand millions. Do the math people- this little event is going to cost the Province of BC over 6 THOUSAND STACKS OF A MILLION DOLLARS.
Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for (most) athletes and have no problem with global events to highlight them and their abilities. The Olympics as they are however are no longer financially viable. A new system needs to be created and it needs to be one that is financially responsible. Can you imagine if the money pissed away spent on the last decade of Olympic games were used instead to fight global hunger and homelessness? Hell, we could even chuck a couple of billion at disease research for things like AIDS, cancer, addiction, etc because we’d sure as shit have the funds.
Throwing a 2 week carnival style party every couple of years is a higher priority than making sure every person on this planet has food, water, and shelter. I’m not talking about using that money to buy us all fucking Hummers and flashy gold watches, I’m talking about FOOD, WATER, AND A FUCKING ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD. We are saying as a species that the Olympics are more important than that. More important than homeless children, more important that bellies swollen from hunger, and more important than the man wasting away from cancer as his family watches. The argument of “it’s too expensive to fix the problems of our poor” is simply not fucking valid when you look at that 6 billion dollars we’re willing and eager to spend on a sporting event.
We humans are one sick and twisted fucking people.
