"When we come together as a nation to support sports we don't care about the other 3 years and eleven months."
This is the kind of thing you can find all over social media today. Amidst proclamations of pride and spirited displays of exaltation, the ridicule of an ancient tradition can be found lurking on your news feeds. The Olympics is a time when some of the greatest athletes in the world come together to compete in their greatest forms; it's a time for countries to find patriotism and nationalism, sometimes despite oppressive or downtrodden conditions at home.
In the United States today, we've gone completely bonkers. Almost five decades later, we've come as close to the madness that was 1968 as we can without tipping the scales. Everywhere an American turns, there are mountains of fear of despotism, jingoistic surges, clashes over racism, and wars over the civil liberties and freedoms of people.
This is the year America has lost its mind.
However, shining through the fog of madness as beacons of hope, we see our Olympic athletes standing as towering monuments of MERICA. Draped in the red, white, and blue, with little discs of metal hanging around their necks, the citizens of this frantic country see the essence of our formerly unrivaled pride.
If ever the summer Olympics have rivaled those in Nazi Germany 1936, it is now in the ravaged Rio games. Eighty years ago, we found refuge in our land's athletes' battering of those of the enemy; today, our athletes are battering our new enemy: division.
Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Gabby Douglas, Ibtihaj Muhammad, Simone Manuel, Aly Raisman, Michael Phelps, Kim Rhode, Jack Sock, Michelle Carter, and so much more. In one way or another, our athletes have consistently come out on top and spoke for what they believe. They repeatedly break records, defy the odds, and show that race, gender, religion, age, or any other factor of their identity can keep them from holding true to the American identity.
I suppose that's the point I want us to find in the middle of all this chaos - We the People still have our American identity, no matter our individual lifestyles. That's what the Olympics is about. That's what the Olympics has been about for millennia. We send our best to face the best of the rest of the world, seeking refuge in knowing that we have something to unite around.
Whether you think Obamacare is a godsend, whether you believe we need a wall and divisions behind it, whether you believe that all this world needs is another Clinton in the White House, remember this - We the People are one people. We the People are our people. We the People is us. That is us on those stages in Rio, and that is us uniting under one flag.
