Perhaps next week the shining onslaught of mass hysteria and mainstream hypnosis that is the frivously-corrupt Olympics will have choked with red mittens the remaining oxygen from the last dissenter's brain.
Perhaps next week. For now, no to the Games, no now, no then, no whatever billions it's going to end up costing later.
No to that song and believing its Stepford Wife proposal. It's not that Miss Believe is wrong, it's that, if one is lucky enough to receive a paycheque, one can weekly see the power of you and me in the taxes being carved off like a big fat steak from the side of a hanging cow. And it's heartbreaking to see those taxes being siphoned off to make a gift-boxed set of Leni Riefenstahl Lite that's then poured like so much saccharine puree into the earhole.
No to the fence around the flame at Jack Poole Plaza, which is as fitting a symbol as any of this elitist spectacle.
There are positives like the opening ceremonies, which would have gone perfectly if Rick Hansen had gotten up and pulled that fourth pillar from the earth. Men's hockey is fun but merely satisfying if Canada wins gold and the bringer of years of angst if it doesn't.
So yes to no. No to the Games because it's bad enough to spend public money building something as ludicrous as a luge track - an epic carnival ride for the few - and worse still to have it turn around and kill someone. No to the Games because it's insufferable to hear snippy Brits sniff about the "worse games ever" and insulting when one considers the prospect of a London Summer Olympics set against the cheery climes of historically-renowned downpour and dolour.
Perhaps yes if the Games were a bit more ... gladitorial. Perhaps speed skating with swords, with the swashbuckling Geena Davisesque Clara Hughes lopping the heads off Germans and Swedes en route to a blood- and beetle-stained podium. Tweak the sliding track just a tad, add piranha pits, jets of flames, and rotating saws. ("It looks like gold for China in bobsled ... oh no, that pesky third rail.")
Mingle the sports. Biathalon could share with figure skating, for instance: fall and the single or couple has to skate the whole program again as a target in the next day's biathalon.
No offense, obviously. But no to the Games.
True, not all of it is the Liberals' fault; the NDP initiated the Olympics' bid. Regardless, the vicious drain on public finances created by the Games has created perversities in areas of government people rely on. Take the School District No. 57 budget. According to the recently released district sustainability committee report, the province, this year, is placing or not funding these financial burdens on education in this community: no additional funds for the implementation of all-day kindergarten, which will cost $1.2 million; $120,000 to, of all things, pay the new harmonized sales tax; freezing the $3.2 million annual facility grant; $200,000 to become 'carbon neutral'; $128,000 in higher Medical Service Premium (MSP) charges; $100,000 in higher teacher pension plan charges and $350,000 in salary and benefit increases to teachers.
All costs, all provincial obligations to the people of Prince George, close to $5.3 million that could be covered by money that is now being spent on the Olympics; all costs that will be born by this current generation of students.
That's why no to the Olympics, even as they go on: why should they party while we pay.
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