Re: Downhill...all the way.
Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 1:10 pm
Nothing, and I mean not one single thing, that is any good has been had in my life through anything less than pain, heart ache, adversity, stress, throwing myself into the wall, into the mix, and falling, falling, getting back up, and falling some more.
Do you think her attitude is any different? Can anybody here understand the level of pressure that she's been under over these Olympics? Not even close. "The course was too bumpy" is probably true and surely doesn't reflect everything that happened here.
Lindsey Vonn is an example of an American.
She is a prime example of an entire people that have become complacent, entitled, fat, lazy, boring, and complete prim donnas.
This is great. Shows that you have no idea how hard people have to work to ski even remotely as well as Vonn does. Maybe your view is distorted by the lens of surfing which, at the level that most of us practice it, takes hardly any physical fitness. Vonn is fitter than you and fitter than pretty much anyone else on the Womens world cup and you use her as a metaphor for lazy Americans? What's wrong with you?
...but that is just it…most of us never will... An entire country full of Lindsey Vonn’s whining about the challenges that they are faced with.
There are two things here. One, most of us never will but all of us can and should. If you are feeling badly about yourself f---ing change.
Two: if you think that the US is an entire country full of whiners, you are dead wrong and need to look harder at the cool, smart, creative, inspiring shite that goes down all over the place in the US. One of the greatest attributes of this country is that we don't take what comes as the way it shall be forever (although the conservative morons are an exception). Look at the arts in Portland, look at the shite that gets built here, look at the architecture. Don't forget that all of the technological innovations that you blame for our complacence were innovated in this country. I hate ipods and iphones more than most, but am strangely gratified that people from the US were smart enough design them. That's not laziness.
In my science I'm surrounded by people who were educated in Europe and have a much fuller grasp of physics, math, language, etc which reflects a superior educational system. These people are damn smart, work really hard, and were successful in their PhDs etc. However, these folk have almost no creative spark and thus the science that comes out of the US is often superior to that of European institutions. Americans are creative and go far with it.
This country is not as sleepy and complacent as you think. But if people like you keep griping that it is, that the old timers worked harder, that things were better way back when, then you will make it in your image. Any vision of the future is a self fulfilling prophesy in a way. Such visions cast models of what the future will be. If you cast an ugly, lazy, boring mold then prepare yourself to receive that shithole of a place to live. But if you amplify the good you'll get something worth living.