I remember the Atlanta Olympics of 1996. My family drove down from Chicago to stay with friends and experience the second week of festivities. On the Saturday we left, some nutcase bombed Olympic Park. We visited the park that Wednesday to find a cordoned area filled with flowers and tiny flags. People walked past dimming their enthusiasm momentarily, but not being cowed by the reminder of the world outside Olympic Fever.
I remember watching the Men’s Individual Archery event when an lesser known athlete from California, Justin Huish, took the gold in an formidable display of concentration and accuracy. When interviewed later about his feelings, he just said: “I’m stoked.” Awesome, dude!
We drove the 60 miles to Athens, Georgia to watch the rhythmic Gymnastics competition, an inspiring display of motion as art form, perfection of grace and the beauty and vitality of youth. Indeed, this is humanity at it’s finest. My daughter, then only five, picked the team in the pink outfits as her champions, I believe they were the Russians, who won the bronze - I may be mis-remembering. As we left the arena, the feeling of the crowd was subdued awe, as if we have experienced the unforgettable - and indeed we had. I recall thinking that such introverted emotions are often associated with firsthand experiences of violence and tragedy, but here we wrestled inwardly with fitting this emotion to a new type of experience: Beauty.
This speaks of the most enduring memory I have of the 1996 Games, a memory of solidarity. Wednesday night in Centennial Olympic Park my wife and I witnessed the biggest party I have ever seen. Despite the plethora of police and national guard troops peeking out from the downtown parking garages surrounding the perimeter of the Park, checking out our totes filled with snacks and water, despite the cordoned reminder of violence in our world, Olympic Park was a four-square-mile fete packed shoulder to shoulder with smiling, laughing, humanity. I mattered not that people couldn’t get anywhere through the crowd, we just formed trains of people slinking through the crowd, meandering in the general direction we wanted to go, others joining and breaking off like so many coal cars in a freight yard. All the while the party vibe was turned up to maximum. Astonished, I turned to my wife and said, ”There’s no attitude here.” Such a thing was beyond my experience.
These memories carry me through today; As I hear the dissonance of the American tapestry through political discourse, I can recall that individual humans are fundamentally good. When good people forget themselves and give their identities over to an idea or an organization, such inherent goodness can be leeched out by ideology or by a group-mind perspective. The result of forgetting our inherent goodness results in such acts as bombing Olympic Park. It results in war, genocide, even pollution. We are not our thoughts; We are not our ideologies. To identify ourselves as such diminishes what we are, limits the human potential each of us carries, and reduces the expression of the human spirit to cruelty, barbarism and hatred.