Crying Shame
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Please raise your hand if there is an Olympic medalist in your family or your spouse's. If not, raise your hand if you know an Olympic medalist very well.
For those who raised their hands, have you ever heard them talk about what their medal meant to them? How hard they trained to reach that level of their sport? What it meant to stand on that medal platform?
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@jolly Sure. I get your point from the athlete’s angle.
But there was a non-zero chance of the games getting cancelled again, and it is a political turd for the Japanese right now.
I’m sure many athletes are just happy the games are actually happening.
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@jolly said in Crying Shame:
Please raise your hand if there is an Olympic medalist in your family or your spouse's. If not, raise your hand if you know an Olympic medalist very well.
For those who raised their hands, have you ever heard them talk about what their medal meant to them? How hard they trained to reach that level of their sport? What it meant to stand on that medal platform?
And forever more the pictures of that incredible moment will be marred by the masks. It's a damn shame.
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I thought nobody cared about the olympics, or was that just last week?
I guess anything that means we can complain about masks can't be that unimportant.
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I dunno.
- Sports are inherently inspirational. Sorry if you don't think so, but you get no conversational brownie points for being out of touch with your own culture.
- Sports are inherently inspirational, and therefore so are athletes. What they do publicly makes us aspire to be as great as they are at their best. Again, sorry if you don't believe athletes should be role models, because they are anyway. Nobody cares what you think.
- Considering these, I suppose you could argue that the mask-wearing further normalizes their use. Showing that they aren't above wearing them could be a kind of public service. Because yes I do believe masks are a good thing and while that's only an opinion, no I don't care if you disagree.
Aside: Olympic athletes—many of them anyway—have crap immune systems.
I can see a case to be made for the masks. But I dunno, I also think #3 above is a bit of a stretch. We're too selfish to even admit to the existence of role models anymore.
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@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
I thought nobody cared about the olympics, or was that just last week?
I guess anything that means we can complain about masks can't be that unimportant.
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Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
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Wrong topic.
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@mik said in Crying Shame:
And forever more the pictures of that incredible moment will be marred by the masks. It's a damn shame.
I dunno . . . making it to the platform, even more making it to the center platform, means a lot more than how the pictures turn out, I would think. Getting there, mask politics or no mask politics, might be thought too enormous to be marred by the photo op.
I don't know.
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There is only that one picture, that one piece of videotape. A crystallized one moment in time.
You know that part of the ceremony where the minister or official says, "You may now kiss the bride" and the photographer snaps that picture? You can recreate it. You can do it over again. But it will never happen again.
Ever.
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@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
Because we can’t discuss a particular application of a mask rule, without extrapolating to a blanket notion of whether COVID is bad for people and whether we should have empathy for that.
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@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
Empathetic bastard, aren't you?
It's a closed room, no audience, everyone tested out the whazoo. And just a few minutes to hours before, that athlete was competing without a mask. You don't think they can take the damn thing off for 180 seconds for maybe the most important moment of their lives?
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@horace said in Crying Shame:
@doctor-phibes said in Crying Shame:
Which is worse, missing funerals, canceling weddings, losing your job, losing family members, or having to wear a mask while you collect your medal?
We've lost our minds alright.
Because we can’t discuss a particular application of a mask rule, without extrapolating to a blanket notion of whether COVID is bad for people and whether we should have empathy for that.
Having to wear a mask for a medal ceremony pales into insignificance next to a lot of the other things that have happened because of Covid.
And last week many of us were saying how little we care about the olympics. What changed?
Suddenly, there's something to talk about, and it isn't even the actual sport? It's masks. The never-ending saga of masks. This isn't about the olympics at all. It's about masks.
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@jolly said in Crying Shame:
There is only that one picture, that one piece of videotape. A crystallized one moment in time.
For the viewers. Not for the athletes. For the athletes, it is one moment among thousands.
Which moment will leave the greater impression on the athlete's own soul? Standing on the platform with the medal? Or the time she was running by herself, pushing, driving, dying, striving for that one more half minute, nobody around, just her and the dawn, and when she collapses, it's with the knowledge that she DID IT?
I don't know, either.
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@catseye3 said in Crying Shame:
@jolly said in Crying Shame:
There is only that one picture, that one piece of videotape. A crystallized one moment in time.
For the viewers. Not for the athletes. For the athletes, it is one moment among thousands.
No, not at the Olympics. That's the pinnacle.
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@jolly said in Crying Shame:
Empathetic bastard, aren't you?
I admit that I've never been particularly good at knowing what others are thinking and feeling.
I realise that puts me in the minority. In fact, I frequently don't know my own motivations for having a certain belief before somebody endowed with an excessive amount of empathy puts me straight.