No big deal

In case you haven’t heard, the Summer Olympics officially begin this Friday in Beijing. Chances are you have heard all about this year’s games, but you don’t really care. You might claim to care during group conversations or to hold on to some novel idea of patriotism, but you don’t really care because most of the sports bore you and in the month of August there are better things to do than watch air rifle competitions.

But it's OK to have pent up frustrations about the Olympics, and how they make you feel like such a red, white and blue tool. I’m here to let you know that most of us other common folk feel the same way about the Olympics as you do. Not many people in America really, truly care about the Olympics, for the same reasons we don’t really care about policies in Washington or violence in Africa: it seemingly doesn’t affect them personally.

No matter how much NBC and its sister networks want to convince us, we all know that each USA victory in a random event doesn’t fill us with as much pride as it would have in 1984. Americans aren’t as patriotic as they once were due to the road our country has been heading down in recent months and years.

And watching athletes we’ve never seen before the opening ceremonies go off to win medals in sports most of Middle America doesn’t give a crap about isn’t going to make us forget about gas prices or the housing crisis. Sure, it might fill us with some pride momentarily, but then we’ll go back to our daily issues and problems.

To most Americans, the Olympics don’t really matter before the opening ceremonies or after the final medal count is tallied. It’s not that the Olympic athletes from our country don’t have our support or that we don’t want to defeat Russia or China or any other foreign power, because obviously it’s awesome to enjoy that in the moment that it occurs.

But most of us just have more important things to worry about this month, and getting lost in the swirling hype around the games that the media tries to force down our throats just isn’t worth it. Having deep patriotic feelings and pride in the good ole’ USA simply doesn’t appeal to our self-centered culture.

The problem with the Olympics aren’t the lackluster sports presented or the lack of knowledge of the general public about the events, it really stems from the media and advertising companies that want everyone to think the games are the most important world event since the last one.

Today’s Americans don’t need to be relentlessly told how crucial the summer games are to morale; they just want to aimlessly watch random badminton or ping-pong matches for a while until they change the channel. I think we all like the Olympics, we just hate being told how they should make us feel or how important they are. Call me a dumb American, but to me, it’s just sports.