My friends – are you as weary, worn and woeful as I have been watching the news of the run-up to the 2024 presidential vote? After a few seconds of the news, I get that itch to switch. I compare the current political news to gavage, the term used to describe the force-feeding of ducks and geese to achieve a ten-times normal sized fatty liver. The end product is a delicacy for humans; not so much for the sequestered and fattened water fowl.
We are drawn like those cliched moths. We moan and complain about the one hundredth view of a politician’s speculation about whether it is better to be eaten by a shark or to be fried by an electric boat. We are flummoxed by the idea of childless cat ladies as an inducement to vote. And we cannot sync the rationale for whining about rally crowd from someone who would be leader of the free world.
Then there’s the guy from one of the richest families in the country scraping roadkill to eat and who later abandons the carcass in Central Park. And how about the female candidate who “turned black.” How in the heck does one do that I think to myself. How would Darwin explain this?
Unnerving and undeserving of our attention is what I say. So how do we counter with something to restore our own mental health with the promise of something uplifting, something hopeful, something just plain more, well, normal.
I submit we should take smaller glimpses of that “must see” political tv and go for the gold. Do it for the sake of your sanity and emotional wellbeing. While we’re not Coneheads, let’s go to France and the Olympic Games.
Ok, I’ll cede you the weird opening ceremonies with a hooded runner carrying the torch, a bizarre rendition of “The Last Supper” and Marie Antoinette, grasping her own severed head. BUT -Celine Dion singing “Hymne à l’amour” at the Eiffel tower sent shivers across the world.
We are able to see Katie Ledecky in performances of a lifetime in women’s swimming. In that same greatest-of-all-time vein, Simone Biles wowed with perfection through the gymnastics moves that only she can perform. We watched a hopeful and sometimes flawed men’s gymnastics lifted to the medal stand by Michael Nedoroscik, the University of Michigan unicorn who rose to the moment on the pommel horse. I was so happy for the women’s high jumper, Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who will carry the gold back to her war-torn Ukraine, that I cried. And can you not be moved by Julien Alfred and Saint Lucia’s only Olympic medal in history, a gold?
We needed this Olympics, dirty Seine or not! Like oxygen, we need to see there is beauty and grace in the humanity who populate this orb with us. We need to see that hate does not make us strong or good at our chosen field. We will not believe that grievance will drive us to win because we are witness to the camaraderie among Olympic competitors, the support of one for another, countryman or not. And we will not go back to any time where fear dominates and freedom to be is stripped to leave us empty and wanting.
In this country we stand at a crossroad and we look for a way forward. We will choose a right path and we will not look back.
