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Monday, August 18, 2008
The message from Olympics is “pride”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forgive me for staying on my soap box again this week… but I think I finally pinpointed the problem.
It once ran in abundance. It was once revered. It was once treasured.
It has instead been replaced by laziness, apathy and greed.
I have been an Olympic junkie for as long as I can remember and was ecstatic when the 1996 Games rolled into Atlanta.
I was sure that many people around me would be just as excited the 2008 Games in Beijing started and water cooler discussions would follow in abundance each day of the games. Afterall, there was and is plenty to discuss.
I was shocked when that didn’t happen.
That is when I thought about it at great length and it hit me about what the missing piece of the “puzzle” was. We have hundreds of property owners that are members of their Home Owners Associations, yet only a small percentage actually show up for their meetings or participate in community events.
Don’t get me started on the commercial and residential property owners who all they care about is making another buck while they let their properties curb appeal decay. How these owners can allow some of the conditions of these properties and actually admit “I own that” is amazing.
We have people who just toss and dump litter and all sorts of garbage all along roads and neighborhoods, and in some cases where a dumpster or trash can is about 5 to 15 feet away.
27,000 Gwinnettians show up to vote in the July primary… out of a county of 770,000 plus residents.
People complain about how jobs are being lost overseas when we handed them over and not fighting (enough) to take them back.
Norcross, Gwinnett County, and this nation has a list of issues to deal with that could probably circle the earth a couple of times but none can be resolved if we don’t fix the common denominator between them all.
Chris Collinsworth of NBC Sports was absolutely right when he said “You know every once in a while somebody will make a comment to me about young people and this country today, but these young Olympians have represented our country so magnificently I think we should all be very proud.”
The problem is those US Olympic athletes in Beijing represent everything this country was once best known for including hard work, perseverance and the most important of them… Pride.
We have no one to blame for a lack of pride but ourselves.
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