Goodbye Olympic Games and Good Riddance.

God am I happy those fucking Olympic games are finally over. Now I can watch the NBC Nightly News at the right time.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against competitive sports. In fact, I played varsity lacrosse in college and club football while I was in graduate school.

But when the competition between athletes becomes a competition between national states, that’s when I draw the line.

Because when they have the medal ceremony and they play the national anthem of the country whose athlete won the gold and the goddamn national flag gets hoisted up for everyone to see, all I can think about is how this country-versus-country competition has a funny way of often turning into mass violence based on nothing more than my country is better than yours.
Violence, particularly violence on an organized mass scale, is the only threat to the human community that we don’t understand, and because we don’t understand why it happens, it happens all the time.

We know what to do about global warming. We know what to do about disease. We know what to do about famine. We may not always have the political will to prevent global warming or pandemics or starvation on a widespread scale, but we know how to both prevent those threats and if they do break out, how to keep them under control.