Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Sochi.

It's been interesting to be living abroad for the Olympics this year.  I have to say it's actually pretty refreshing -- the coverage is nonstop on Romanian television, with a lot fewer athlete interviews and a lot more sports, and far more even coverage of athletes from all over the world, rather than only the Americans.  I miss the NBC trumpet fanfare, but other than that, I think I'd take this vantage point any day.

But it's also been interesting to watch some of the comments on Sochi -- the city itself, the messy and unfinished hotels, the dirty water, the corruption.  Through the grapevine of social media and John Stewart, Jack and I have quickly come to realize that Sochi has become a bit of a laughingstock to a lot of Americans. 

And it makes me mad.

I know that cross-cultural experiences have their fair share of humor.  Mistakes in translation, new foods that startle our palate, and new experiences where we are entirely out of our element -- these things make us laugh, and help us see the world with delight.  But there's an important distinction between this sort of delighted-wow-this-is-crazy laughter, and the laughter of disdain and sarcasm, directed at problems you have no intention of becoming involved in.

Corruption isn't funny.  Dirty tap water isn't funny either.  The fact that the Russian government couldn't even put on a facade to cover these problems, despite the investment of over 50 billion dollars, should make us react not with judgment and ironic humor, but with alarm and sorrow -- because if this is what the "cream of the crop" is getting, what's the reality in the rest of Russia?  How dare privileged athletes and journalists from the richest country in the world poke fun at a culture and people they hardly know?  (And while I'm at it, how dare they forget that in many communities in their own country, the conditions aren't much better...)

We seem to have forgotten that the struggles of the rest of the world aren't fodder for jokes.  The dirty water thing, for instance.  Yes, you could joke about it... but the reality is that the water has been polluted because the Russian corporation in charge of much of the Sochi construction set up a huge illegal dump for the waste from its construction project near a local village.  The dump dried up the entire village's water supply, and now the wastewater from the dump is seeping into the river which serves as the primary source of drinking water for Sochi.  (Learn more here.) Once you hear that, it becomes a lot harder to laugh it off.  Sure, it's a problem for the athletes and journalists and spectators who traveled to the Olympics this year.  But it is surely not a cause for laughter -- particularly because in two weeks, the Olympics end.  But everyone whose drinking water has been ruined by this exorbitantly expensive endeavor?  Their water supply remains the same -- dirty, undrinkable, unsafe.

I don't mean to point a finger at Russia.  Living in Romania, watching the protests in Ukraine, hearing the stories of this entire bloc of Eastern European countries, has been lesson enough that Communism takes a long, long time to recover from, and that corruption is a really big, horrible, insidious thing.  (And no, the issues in Sochi are not entirely the fault of Communism or corruption.)  But still, the stories of corruption should disturb us.  The unpaid workers used to build the beautiful Olympic Village, without adherence to labor laws, should anger us.  The extravagance and expense of the Olympics should alarm us (and that's not just Sochi... that's all of 'em, and all of us).

I love the Olympics.  I want them to last, to live up to their ideals, to be a place where we learn about our neighbors around the world, where we feel the best sort of patriotism, where miracles still happen, where beauty and grace and skill are admired by all of us, all around the world, regardless of who demonstrates it.  But this part?  This ugly part, with the condescending attitudes and insensitivity to the local effects of waste and corruption?  This reaction of mockery instead of concern?  That I don't like.

So here's to you, Sochi.  Thanks for putting on the Olympics.  And hang in there.

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