Saturday, January 3, 2015

Competitive athletics is distracting us from solving our problems (#2164)

If we don't recognize that our entertainment has become more important than our goals of having a better society then we are doomed to fail as a society. We are currently in this paradigm. We can find money to pay for sporting events that are too expensive to attend for most Americans yet we have no plan to spend a single penny on improving our national infrastructure nor our educational and social safety net programs. So instead of money going to help our economy in ways that return to us a benefit, we are more inclined to give our money to a few profiteers who stoke the competitive nature of our spirits with few victories and more so too many disappointments. But hey, there is always next year. Now I am all for competitive sports being utilized to galvanize us for improving ourselves but in today's existing market, competitive sports has taken most of the ambition we should have in societal advancement and monopolized it away from pressing problems that need immediate solutions. Meanwhile the few wealthy who control organized sporting competitions rake in our attendance and our money for their own personal gain without giving very much back to us as a return for our involvement. Can I really blame the wealthy for capitalizing on our own need for competition as an outlet in our lives? Not really, they are just doing what we allow as law to exist. It is the flawed system of capitalism that let's the privateers in our world control the public domain without an equal cost benefit for societal improvement. I am just as rabid a fan for some sports programs as the next person but I realize that we are in a catch twenty two. We know that competitive sports gives us little except occasional satisfaction while we continue to dole out too much money and attention to have it in our lives. It is like that old saying, we have looked into the eyes of our enemy and it us us.

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