It’s not easy to be an Olympian.
That’s kind of the point. These are the most physically talented men and women in the world — all 2,800 of them. They’ve spent years training to get to this spot, and now we all get to watch them do things most of us would never even attempt while trying to determine who among them is the best in the world. (READ MORE: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 190: The Female Olympian You Should Be Cheering Against)
In our modern world, the Olympics strike as something of an anomaly: This isn’t the kind of event where everyone gets participation awards and goes home mildly annoyed that competition amounts to nothing these days. This isn’t some kind of global “kumbaya” where we erase our differences.
No, this is where men and women patriotically do their best to represent the rest of us well (and to prove that all that money we sank into their training was worth it). The Olympic field is one where skill and expertise are rewarded; where countries are celebrated and patriotism is praised while the whole world watches.
This is good old-fashioned competition and good old-fashioned national pride — sights you don’t see on the global stage every day.
Of course, that’s not the world most of these athletes grew up in. Sure, they’ve been competitive (they wouldn’t be in Milan otherwise), but they’ve also spent their entire lives being indoctrinated in an ideology that believes national pride is a vice we should have all outgrown. Need proof? Newsweek has a list of all the U.S. athletes who have used their five minutes of fame to lambast their president.
For instance, Rich Ruohonen, a lawyer turned athlete, told journalists in Milan that he believes there are constitutional issues with the way the federal government is trying to enforce its immigration law in his home state of Minnesota.
Hunter Hess expressed his “mixed emotions” when it comes to representing the U.S. at the Olympics: “There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t,” he said during a press conference. “I think for me it’s more I’m representing my, like, friends and family back home, the people that represented before me. All the things that I believe are good about the U.S. I just think if it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I’m representing it.” (READ MORE: The NFL Should Have Noticed What Japan Gets Right)
President Donald Trump responded by calling Hess a “real Loser.”
Then there’s Amber Glenn, a figure skater and self-identified pansexual, who decided to use her newfound platform to publicly criticize the treatment the LGBTQ “community” has experienced under the Trump administration.
To be perfectly fair to these athletes, they’ve all clarified that they are actually quite proud to represent their country — even Hunter Hess. In fact, they usually begin any statement to the media on any contentious question (and the media, as always, has enjoyed asking quite a lot of those) with that very important disclaimer; they just generally follow it up with the word “but” followed by their favorite political pet peeve.
The problem here isn’t that these athletes don’t like the policies of the current presidential administration. Patriotism — especially in America and the West more broadly — doesn’t require slavish adherence to a particular set of political beliefs (fortunately); it requires that we love our country. These men and women say that they do, and they likely mean it.
Unfortunately, they’ve also been told that the best way to love that country is to air what they believe is her dirty laundry on the world stage. Doing so, they’ve been told, is an act of bravery — never mind that it betrays a total lack of decorum. There’s a time and a place to criticize a country’s political leaders: While you’re representing that country at the Olympics isn’t it.
The way we love our country shouldn’t be all that different from the way we love our parents. Thomas Aquinas and most of the philosophers of antiquity saw a close relationship between filial devotion and patriotism — one that’s even reflected in the etymology. “Patriotism,” after all, comes from the Latin patria, which means “fatherland” and is closely related to “pater,” which itself means father.
The logic is simple. Your country, like your parents, plays an integral role in shaping you and providing for you, therefore we owe it a similar kind of love.
There’s a reason we all cringe when an American tells the entire world that “Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.” If you wouldn’t criticize your parents in front of the entire world while engaging in an exercise designed to make them proud of you, you shouldn’t criticize your country there either.
Representing this country proudly is the only job American Olympic athletes have — and they’re failing at it.
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