Every Four Years

by Gary Silverman

I am an Olympic nut. No, I can’t win any trivia contests. I can’t name who or what country won what medal in what sport. It’s not even the specifics of the games. It is the pageantry. It’s the youthful vigor (and I’m including the “old” ones: Diana Taurasi and Meghan Musnicki who are in their 40s). It’s the spirit and purity of sport.

Sure, that’s a rather idealized look at the Olympics. After all, the people organizing, running, competing, attending, viewing and judging are human. And humans do have their faults…especially toward other humans.

So, it’s not the reality of the Olympics that makes me a fan (though I enjoy it immensely), but rather the Olympic ideal—what the games stand for--that brings tears to my eyes.

It’s like the Star-Spangled Banner. It’s not a reflection of our reality—it is what we strive to make true.

Why focus on the Games for their unencumbered splendor instead of what has really happened in the past? Why talk of the Olympics and not mention, in the same breath, Hitler’s Germany, the Massacre in Munich, or the graveyard of the Olympic Stadium in Sarajevo? Because while each is a lesson for humans about humanity that needs to be remembered, those and other less terrible events are not what I choose to represent the Olympics.

Am I naïve? Am I delusional? Have I lost a sense of reality?

Maybe. But I’m also not willing to let the negatives of the world pull me down.

For many, the caustic tone of our current presidential election is the ultimate representation of unsportsmanlike conduct. I’m the first, and usually the loudest, in my office to express dismay at the shenanigans in Washington. At the same time, however, I am very proud. After all, in the last year we have seen people throughout the world give their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to gain freedom and democracy for themselves and their children. We already have that privilege.

There is a ribbon soaked in the blood of heroes, reluctant and bold, that has secured our ability to walk unimpeded to the voting booth to vote as we wish for the person we deem most fit.

If you are one of those that think the election of one candidate or the other will be the end of the American dream, I say bull. You shortchange this country. You shortchange yourself. For we are not the president. We are not the politicians. We are not bureaucrats. We are the people. And we the people set our own destiny. We maintain a system, even at times when it’s messy, that allows it to be our mess-up, not some military junta or dictator.

If you want to give up on the ideals that generations before us strove for, then that’s your right. But it’s a right I don’t plan on exercising. Even if we take a backward step now and then, I choose to march ever forward to the ideals that this nation stands for and believe that every time I exercise my right to vote, I am getting a chance that others don’t have—to go for the gold.