01 March 2010
 
Departures

Time to go. Time to leave Vancouver and the Games of 2010; time for this damned winter to be banished; the moment for some of us to head overseas for semesters far afield; time for others to leave places that had been home for a long time, and strike out in a new direction.
 
Time to see some new sights. Take in a vista or two that sear the soul with the unexpected.
 
I am not sure I could have sat all the way through the closing ceremonies of the Games. I boycotted the opening session, though I should not have. I was amazed to see every Canadian of note get a few minutes to share their thoughts with the world.
 
The Canadians should be pleased with themselves after coming back from abject defeat to snatch the Gold from the U.S. men’s hockey team. Damn. That kid Miller in goal was a marvel, and it stung that Crosby got the winning overtime goal.

It had been a great run for the Yanks, and in the larger context, a marvelous set of Winter games with medals galore.
 
But the Canadians got their gold, owning the podium in that count and beating the rest of the world. The Americans will go home with a certain amount of satisfaction in the breadth, if not the summit, of their accomplishments.
 
Not so with the Russians. There will be hell to pay for that, and with the Games on their home soil in four years,
 
I am not, though the toes are tapping. Things are a little more complex and harder to put into one footlocker. I think it is time to start getting organized, though.
 
We have looked about the near and longer-term challenges in this strange and murky future. We are clearly in for some tough and uncomfortable times. The level of discomfort is a purely relative thing, and it will be interesting to see it play out.
 
It has always been thus. Each generation has faced its catastrophes and unimaginable sorrows. Of course, it is only unimaginable in the moment before it happens.
 
The worst can be accepted in time, as the citizens of Tokyo and Berlin could tell you, along with those of Shanghai and Constantinople and all the other places that faced the worst of humankind and survived, after a fashion.
 
We seem to have lost our way as a Republic; forgetting simple lessons like paying our bills and minding our own business. The situation may be manageable or it may not. But that too is nothing new. The earthquakes in Chile and Haiti are potent reminders that the affairs of humankind are trifling matters to the uncaring soil.
 
We have dug ourselves a vast trench, we have, and it will not be pleasant digging our way back out the other side. But it has been a great ride, hasn’t it?
 
A bit self-indulgent, though I am hard-pressed to think what else the heirs of all that sacrifice would have done differently. The Boomers had such lofty hopes and such contempt for those who gave us so much.
 
Pearl Buck described the process in her marvelous novel The Good Earth, which traced a Chinese family in their journey from hard-working peasantry through time at the top of the podium and back to peasants in three generations.
 
I cannot impact the course of what is to come any more than you can. As the Russians view the next set of Games in Sochi, there will be some real challenges ahead.
 
2014 seems like a long way away, though the planet will spin on its ordained course and it will come, as improbable as it seems in the hangover of this morning. Things will be very different when those games open. Some of us will have moved on, others will be wondering whatever the hell we were thinking back then, in 2010 when the decade was new.
 
Mr. Putin has observed that the Olympic Games has become a matter of state politics for the citizens of Great Russia.
 
Thank goodness, we don’t have to worry about that.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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