To the Editor:

I am alarmed by the arrest of the protesters at the Olympic torch ceremony in Golden. These people were exercising freedom of speech and freedom of assembly as supposedly provided for in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

How can our country take issue with China over human rights abuses when we are well on our way to an abusive totalitarian rule here? Our governments and their barking dogs, the police, are not our friends. They are all part of the corporate agenda, a marriage between government bureaucracy and multi-national corporations.

The Olympics is the crowning jewel of corporatism and consumerism. It is consumerism that is killing us, not that we don’t have a need for manufactured goods, but rather that the construction of, and useful life of these goods, is appalling.

The New York garbage dump on Staten Island (now closed so it won’t interfere with air traffic) is the largest man-made structure on the planet. Check out “garbage island” on You-tube and internet search: “Fresh Kills landfill” or “largest manmade structure on Earth.”

The Olympics is about driving the human body to extremes and quite often with later health consequences. It is about human conquest, and therein is the crux of the problem, this desire in man that we must conquer the earth and defy our mortality.

The Olympics is about using our tax dollars at the expense of other pressing social needs to conduct a frivolous celebration that is a culmination of everything that is wrong in this world. The attempts to make these games look ethical is laughable at best. All the sheeple may be fooled, but some of us are not so cute and cuddly... or stupid.

Sadly, the Olympics will ultimately be a flawed jewel of fading luster on a very large pile of garbage.

Ed Nixon,

Winlaw B.C.

Comments