Let’s put the bombs in mothballs.
Why not holster all of the guns?
Neutralize the nukes and instead, break out the soccer balls. Brandish the badminton racquets. Keep the warships in port and instead, haul out the kayaks and canoes.
Call me naïve, but why didn’t George Bush and Saddam Hussein just take out a pair of boxing gloves to settle things?
Instead of terrorism, why not settling things on the trampoline? How about a rousing contest of Twister?
The London Olympics once again restored my faith in the power of sports.
I was watching the Russians beat the Brazilians in men’s volleyball the other day.
I found myself cheering for the Russians and that alone is incredible. I grew up during the Cold War. I was a kid when people weren’t putting in swimming pools, they were building bomb shelters. The specter of an atomic bomb landing somewhere north of Eight Mile Road seemed very real.
So what, a couple of decades later, I am screaming for another wicked kill at the net by Dmitriy Muserskiy, Russia’s 7-2 definitive point of emphasis.
I marvel as he gets kill after kill, just as I marvel at the talents of teammate Maxim Mikhaylov, who scored 25 in his team’s win over Bulgaria.
Earlier in the Olympic Games, I found myself loudly cheering for China’s 16-year-old Ye Shiwen, a marvelously talented swimmer.
I was cheering for her, even though I don’t normally spend a lot of applauding for China because an awful lot of things we used to hammer together here in America are now being cranked out in China.
Time was when the “Made in China” tag was one that harkened immediate derision. Now, you can hardly find a product without that tag.
The Olympic Games are hardly perfect. But we’d be a lot closer to perfection as a human race to follow their lead.
The only superpowers this world needs are on the field of play.