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Serious Question: Where Can We Come Together?
The question we should all be asking after this year’s Olympics is, “What is up with women’s soccer players?”
2021 saw an unprecedented spike in Olympic wokeness. It wasn’t just America (as I have heard many say,) but it appears to have been only women and mostly soccer players.
Women’s soccer players from New Zealand, Chile, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States all took a knee this year in protest. The United States’s Raven Saunders twerked for the camera and raised her arms in an X to represent intersectional oppression, while Gwen Barry turned her back during the national anthem at the Olympic trials. Costa Rican female gymnast, Luciana Alvarado, also joined in protest by ending her routine kneeling with one fist raised to the air.
The Olympics are designed to bring us together. This year, we saw it tear us apart. In a speech to the TPUSA Student Action Summit, Former President Trump mentioned the US women’s soccer team and the crowd of young conservatives instantly began to boo.
This made me quite sad. I know Americans are divided, but to see Americans boo our own sports team makes our national division impossible to ignore.
Are there places left where we can come together?
I used to watch the Tonys before they became unbearingly politically divisive. When former Vice President Pence attended a production of Hamilton and was booed by the audience and lectured by the cast, it was clear that the theater was no longer a place to come together. (Which is the whole point of theater.)
I know people who used to watch the Emmys and can now hardly stand to watch a celebrity lecture them about women’s rights, climate change, and racial justice for even one more second.
The NFL used to bring families together under the banner of their favorite team. Now, you can’t watch a major game without the NFL making some kind of clunky “antiracist” gesture.
Can we agree on anything anymore? If America is a broken family, does that mean every Christmas dinner when we come together we are going to fight? I hope not.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Is there any haven from overt politicization of all things?
Where is it? How do I find it?
Published in Culture
I don’t know.
Today, a friend took offense at something I wrote yesterday on homosexuality. He apparently is not willing to know me anymore if I do not entirely embrace his point of view.
An old story for all of us, I know. But this was fresh to me. And there does not appear to be anything I can do about it.
You may find a haven in a true Bible-believing church.
You must be discerning, because there are many buildings — and entire denominations — that are masquerading as churches. Rainbow flags, support for illegal aliens, or homosexuals, or the trans-crazies, or female pastors or preachers, are signs that you are not at a Bible-believing church.
I find it somewhat difficult to give up sports, or to give up popular entertainment. They are cesspools of radicalism, perversion, lies, hatred of God, and hatred of our country. It seems sad, but maybe it’s for the best. Perhaps I focused on those things too much.
Nowhere.
The republic ended 10 years ago. This is just the decomposition of the corpse.
Have an exit plan.
We have family who are lefties (although I am sure they would not characterize themselves as such). We do not discuss ANYTHING even remotely related to politics.
On the sports side, college football hasn’t been too infected with the SJW bug.
We can all come together to hate each other and destroy each other’s lives–all working together for the common good.
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Rudyard Kipling
Oh yeah. There are lots of people we can come together and hate. The lady who ran Theranos comes to mind. Bernie Madoff. Its one of the few things that can unit people of all sides.
It’s driven by new political opportunities. Imagine taking over the richest country in the history of man. There’s enough to go around a long ways, thousands of families. Rotten, getting rottener but that’s the way it works and when you’re this rich, it’ll take more than one generation for the economic costs to reach enough folks who run things for the thing to collapse. The 300 plus rest of us don’t matter unless we rise up, which clearly we’re not.
I don’t think coming together is a worthy pursuit or a net positive. I believe societies are much better off when they segregate based on ideology or culture, and only come together for mutual benefits like commerce. The post-Ottoman Empire Middle East, the Balkans, and the current oligarch, anti-Federalist United States are good examples on why unity is not a good thing.
People often set aside their differences and come together in wartime or to fight off a common enemy. (Not always, but often.) I don’t recommend setting up come-together moments like that, even though it seems to be working for Putin.
Same as President Reagan’s Soviet policy … We win, they** lose.
** the socialist democrats and their useful idiot NT gOp’ers
To see athletes denigrate the nation that They are supposedly representing is impossible to ignore. Perhaps, Americans wouldn’t boo Our Own sports team if Our Own sports team wouldn’t malign Americans.
It is sufficient to ignore the teams doing so. And the events. And those who present the events.
Hey, NBC Sports – how did the ratings for the Games go this Olympics? Lived up to your expectations, did they? How about your advertisers?
I’m sorry to hear this. I hate to see friendships dissolve over differences in opinion.
Good point. Perhaps I have as well. I certainly did in regards to the happenings of theater and Broadway. Though it is nice to have places we can go and forget about the worlds problems–theater, movies, sports, all served that purpose very nicely.
I have hope for us yet! Perhaps because I am 25 and hope seems to be the best way forward. :)
Hmm. Interesting thought, I’m not sure I agree. Isn’t some level of “coming together” necessary in the United States to continue to prosper? It seems we will have to agree on some things as a society.
I spoke with another person about this and she compared the feeling she got when the athletes kneeled to betrayal. Is that how you feel as well?
“I spoke with another person about this and she compared the feeling she got when the athletes kneeled to betrayal. Is that how you feel as well?”
Betrayal is a strong word, but that does accurately characterize how I felt about the NFL going all SJW. There used to be boundaries. Used to be sports were about sports, and most everyone understood that you didn’t inject anything else into (except maybe a product placement or two), especially politics. Not matter who we were, we could get together and cheer for our team. Then, along came whats-his-face who made kneeling popular and ruined it. So, I’m done with the NFL.
The Olympics used to be something special, too. High-level competition, national pride, and you got to see sports you usually never even gave a thought to. It was fun, and we eagerly looked forward to it. Decades ago, my first sergeant even brought a TV along on a training deployment in the desert (29 Palms CA) so we could watch the summer Olympics when in camp. Not any more.
So, I guess betrayal is not too strong of a word.
I don’t believe that unity leads to prosperity. We have all been indoctrinated into the Lincoln myth that America has always been One Nation, when that was never the case, nor was it the intent. Almost all of our problems come from this misunderstanding of history. Unity should be about respecting differences and coming together for common goods (federalism). Too often, unity just means do what the central authority wants under threat of force. This is why everyone is so unhinged right now, we have too much “unity.” If Florida was allowed to be Florida and California was allowed to be California, we would not be in this mess. The one size fits all, top-down approach does not work because it creates too much conflict.
You can go back to the founding and see that this is not a new development. Early on, Massachusetts was often trying to force their ideas on others, which often lead to conflict. All attempts to unify have lead to conflict. If we are talking about voluntary unity, then I am all for that. Prosperity always follows when their is free exchange and freedom of association. Unity is another term that is almost universally thrown around as a net good without a second thought, and I think we need to talk about exactly what unity means before doing that.
I didn’t watch at all. Originally it was the human interest stuff that put me off, but that was the last Olympics.
Coming together is over-rated and unlikely. The immediate post-war consensus was an historical anomaly. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t be a nation. The only large polities that last are pluralistic. That was the Founders’ and America’s genius to incorporate pluralism into the warp and woof of our nation. The last 30-40 years have been an aggressive undoing, by the Left, of the respect for pluralism (initiated, of course, under the banner of respecting pluralism). Respect for the differences of others is no longer a two-way street. The Left has successfully turned that into a one-way street, with travel going faster and getting narrower. That is a guarantee for a firey end. How will it end? I don’t know. But it will. The question is what happens next? I don’t know if that’s recoverable or not, but we would be wise to work like it is. I’m inclined to think it is.
OK @mikayla-goetz, not to disrespect you or be overly critical so take this for what it’s worth, but let me pass alone some sage advice my grandmother gave to me about wishes and hope, which has served me well throughout my life. You can poop in one have hand and wish/hope in the other, then see which one fills up first. This advise was further driven home to me by my 40 years military training (from ground grunt to operations planner) which emphasized that “hope is not a plan.” For me, I have faith that we as a country will move forward from this, but not without some bump and bruises. That I will need the grit to survive what ever comes at me and should plan accordingly. I think it was Churchill that remark: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted,” but it was Otto von Bismarck that commented about the U.S.A. : “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” I believe they are both right.
Commerce. But only if people accept that differences may persist. When Person A produces a really good product or service that Person B wants, and Person B has money or some other item that Person A is willing to take in trade, they are likely to make the trade despite differences between the ideologies held by Person A and Person B. And each person may learn something about the other in the process.
The person opposed to same-sex marriage likes the music of pro-same-sex marriage homosexual musician and hires that musician for a party. Company with nutty views on slavery nonetheless produces easy to use and reliable computer equipment, and people who appreciate easy to use and reliable computer equipment buy from that company notwithstanding its nutty views on slavery. Even people who think eating the foods of an ethnic group other than their own are tempted by really tasty examples, and the ethnic restauranteurs serving those tasty examples are happy to take their money in exchange.
Unfortunately, a growing number of culture warriors (mostly on the SJW side) place such a premium on ideological purity that they will forgo a life made more comfortable or more convenient by Person A’s product or service if Person A doesn’t hold absolute ideological purity. But most people can appreciate a really good chicken sandwich regardless of the ideology of the founder of the restaurant that serves that chicken sandwich.
Yes.
We had months of domestic terrorism through riots in the name of the biggest hate movement since the 1920s KKK, and half the country, including all major national institutions, celebrated it. With respect, you should not be concerned with ‘coming together’, you should be concerned with survival and resistance in the face of persecution, from both government and ‘private’ institutions.
I don’t pay attention to women’s soccer at all but the US mens basketball team is the 1st national team I have rooted against and celebrated their losses. They should be competing for China
Coming together on election day is one such thing. (Not by mail, but having to look those neighborhood idiots in the eye who vote for despicable tyrants like Biden is the type of coming together we need.)
But getting together for the Emmys, or NFL, or other celebrityland activities? I don’t care to belong to that world.
It probably depends a bit on geography. I have noticed that when I have attended science fiction conventions in Utah, politics never comes up. Probably because the progressives realize that they are in a place where a lot of conservatives live, so they keep their politics to themselves. But go to a SF convention in Denver or Madison and they seem to think that everyone there must be on the left, so people will feel free to bash conservatives or libertarians even when the topic at hand has nothing to do with current day politics.
Some of my SF-loving conservative brethren see this as a reason to not go to conventions. I hold that there is nothing inherently left wing about that genre of literature and there is no reason to let a few loudmouths drive us away.