The Olympic Games; wonderful event or frivolous distraction?

The Olympic Games are a serious business, but a frivolous distraction humanity simply cannot afford.

The actual economic cost is a minor consideration compared to the near-total disengagement it causes among people, alienating them from things in the world that really matter, chief among them our abuse of earth’s resources and what should be a worldwide concern for climate change.

I stand with those who admire the efforts of the athletes, for their commitment to an idea; their push for perfection; and their relentless desire to be the best.

Their enthusiasm, endeavour and seemingly bottomless energy seep through society, but with little resistance as humans have evolved and succeeded because of that innate competitiveness and so even governance has become something of a competition.

The Games are a worthy event, but strangely irrelevant, or is it inchoate? in a world whose future revolves around a maturity; a maturity that will see us understand that the satisfactions from such moments are foreign to what will have to invent and draw pleasure from in an energy restrained future.

Rather than gather as a world of nations every four years to physically pit ourselves against each other in what might be friendly competition, we should be pooling our  resources every day to better understand our reason; how we can endure without stripping the world of its resources; and how we can live a reasonable life in an energy restrained world.

Organizers of the present Rio Games are obviously conscious of climate change and the threat it means to the world as the idea and our need to address it was portrayed during the much-celebrated opening ceremony.

To simply acknowledge the difficulty is simply not enough for even if the world’s nations adhere to promises which emerged from the Paris discussions in December last year, the world is still bound for temperature increases of nearly three degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial age temperatures and that, according most climate scientists, could tip the world into an uncertain future.

On the eve of “Earth Overshoot Day 2016,” it seems a reasonable time to consider the relevance of such massive energy and intellectual-consuming events as the Olympic Games.

Are they necessary and if something of their ilk is, then maybe they need to morph into some sort of low-energy intensity event?