Torch Relay

The corporate sponsorship extravaganza, uhh, I mean the Olympic torch relay came through town yesterday. Since it was going to end up right in my backyard, and since some bands were going to play, we wandered over with the lad.

And it was of course all a bit nausea inducing. It was essentially just an excuse for Coca-Cola and RBC to promote themselves. Big screens for Bell and McDonalds commercials. The usual tepid exhortations from the stage for people to “make some noise” and “wave their hands in the air.” How this was “their Olympic moment.” And the worst was when the “MC” urged the crowd to “give it up” for an apparatchik of RBC, who he called a hometown hero. What because he gave a cheque for a few thousand dollars to the hospital? Seriously? A multi-billion dollar bank gives an infinitesimal amount of what they’re worth to a hospital and the guy who hands it over is now a hero? So what does that make someone who runs into a burning house to save a kid? We’re not going to put the two on the same plane are we?

One point that had me asking WTF, was a female cop who I don’t even think was 41⁄2' tall. Come on, really? Has our headlong rush to “embrace diversity” and be “inclusionary” gotten to the point where we now have police officers the size of a child? We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, so we’ll let anyone that wants to be a cop, be a cop? That had to be some socialist do-gooder quota that had to be filled. Sorry, call me a chauvinist, but I have a hard time taking her seriously. A police officer needs to have a commanding presence, and if called up on be able to go toe to toe with a scroat. To my mind she doesn’t qualify on either count.

Anyway, eventually the gigantic, poorly rolled joint, uhh, I mean the large, misshapen doob, uhh, I mean the Olympic torch showed up. We had positioned ourselves in a spot that it went right past.

The hippies were out protesting of course. I certainly haven’t drunk from the Olympics kool-aid either - I think it’s a huge expenditure of tax payers money with very little tangible benefit to the average person. The boosters of the Olympics and many other big events like this - the PanAm Games, the Commonwealth Games - mouth a lot of empty platitudes. Wow, “regional pride”? I’d prefer my regional pride to come from a well funded educational system or a functional health system.  The people that stand to benefit – hotels, restaurants, useless knick-knack providers, etc. need to be the ones footing the bill. But the inevitable gaggle of hippies in Che Guevara T-shirts playing bongos wailing about stolen native land. Puhlease. It’s here. Suck it up. Do something to oppose the next event like it, but protesting against this one makes you look like the predictable, ineffectual malcontents you are.

But Anand enjoyed himself, he got to hoot and hooler with some of his little school chums, so I guess my bah humbuggery doesn’t really matter much in the end.