The Olympic Spirit. Relevance to the games and the war games. Individuals compete, countries count the medals. It's a sort of substitute for virility of each nation in the world arena. So we have a mixture of wonderful personal achievement, national pride, commerce and delusion. So any discussion of the games that shows immediate clarity is likely to be simplistic.
Here's our collective ideas from this mixed up but excellent thread:
1. The Humanity we must look for and nurture: As Bart says we can feel privileged to have been born with our opportunities but we should identify too with the humanity that binds us all. After all, that's the ideal of the "Olympic Spirit".
2. Individuals: Therefore we must especially identify with, support and celebrate the individual athletes who strive against all odds to compete and even win. This especially applies to those from countries with neither great resources or power.
3. We must understand people's national pride. I respect Jeff's devotion to service and country. I also comprehend and feel the deep resentment of many to the USA and it's policies. We cannot alter these perceptions as an aside to discussing the Olympics. They are, after all, the elephants in the stadium
4. The comments so far, taken in context,, (ignoring allowable nationalistic flourish) are, in total balance, an evenhanded, respectful distribution of persepectives. Nicolas and I, from the beginning made the decision to allow people to speak their minds on controversial political or religious matters as long as they did not bring a threatening or demeaning tone. That we cannot tolerate.
5. We can be proud that we'd dare venture discussing difficult and inflammatory subjects in an open forum. It's a huge risk as people can get offended. However, we all can learn a lot by re-reading other points of view and checking to see if we have gaps in our knowledge or empathy. When things get contentious, please don't throw up your arms and be upset at how unreasonable any of us might be. Few of us are totally rational in our positions or are totally informed.
6. It's so easy for us not to let discussions go on. We can easily close a thread, but we don't! We want to construct a set of examined ideas that we can own in common, no matter what our background. Yes, a Georg Baumann might have extreme opinions, some even harsh, but he has disarming humor and I always learn from him. Bart is brilliant and I never miss a word he writes. Nicolas has strong moral values that I always need and value. Lots of us bring such or even better raw materials to this effort.
We build from such bricks of facts and consideration assembled with respect and trust. But then we must risk disclosing our positions and hear each other out. The expectation is that Truth might come this.
For this we also need freedom of thought and a continued diversity of input.
For sure, on a photography forum, this discussion might seem out of place. It is actually going on in other photographic site like the LF forum. Creative people are open to ideas ideals and questioning what might be important. Still, we need to have fun too.
So, let's find the heroes from Brazil, Kenya and Barbados and celebrate them. That's the way to balance the more difficult discussion of what governments do in our name.
Asher
