In the Darkness

I am not a sports fan. As a martial artist (of sorts) I’ll watch a fight of some sort when I can, but wont go out of my way to do so. I’ll also, occasionally, watch a football game because I like to see physical feats of brutal contact and bloodshed, and Monday Night Football is cheaper than a Pay-Per-View fight ticket and handily on broadcast TV. With an opportunity to do so I will watch rodeo until my eyes bleed and roll up in my head, but from my background rodeo isn’t sports its religion. But that’s the extent of my sports watching.
Except for one thing – The Olympics. Winter or Summer I always watch most of the Olympics.
Yes, I enjoy seeing people in top physical and mental form put themselves to the test, and win. But it’s more important than that for me too.
I am a romantic about the Olympics. I know they are, in reality highly commercialized and rife with behind the scenes cattiness, corruption and in-fighting, but when I see so many nations of the world gathered to gather to compete in what I still believe is a true spirit of fairness for most of them, it makes me proud to be a human being.
Normally most things don’t do that – I find humans, on whole, a disagreeable lot with many bad traits and habits and I’d just as soon start colonizing Mars and leave nearly the entire bunch on this mud-ball to rot. But, seeing people from all over the world coming together to compete in physical sport warms the recesses of my black little heart.
It does not give me hope that tomorrow will be a better day, I know better. This is a world plagued with many things from disease, to the “liberal myth” of global warming, to the aftershocks of imperial colonialism. These are not things that will go away overnight because athletes came together and competed.
But I have hope that there are still strong, dedicated, people in this world. And that they can come together in some fashion, and do something “together”. It is a small beginning, or perhaps a small remnant, of that unity I have spoken of before. Either way, it is a small golden glimmer of something greater, and like the last reflection of the setting sun on a rippling pond it is a sign that says, “After the darkness, there is dawn”.
It will be a long road – and most of us will not survive to see the end of it. We’ll have to hang onto the glimmers we can get.