Having been in Europe for over 3 weeks now, it’s been an eye-opening experience in a number of ways.

• Having a Dublin hotel a block away from a watershed location of Irish resistance.
• Viewing the Magna Carta in Lincoln Castle.
• Listening for spirits at Stonehenge. (Didn’t hear any, but there was a group of people chanting)
• Understanding the totality of the cultural looting on display in the British Museum.

But now, sitting in a Paris apartment the morning after the opening ceremony, the one idea I can think of to summarize everything I am experiencing is in the headline: Cognitive Dissonance.

For those needing a refresher, cognitive dissonance is when you hold/believe in two ideas that are at odds with one another, and the resulting coping mechanisms used to make it make sense, however (in)effective they may be.

The Olympics is a bucket list experience for me. Some of my earliest memories is being in the room watching Olympic swimming in 1996, I would’ve been 4 years old. Since then it has become one of the ways my mother and I have bonded over time. And now, we are here in Paris. Together.

For most part, it is great, borderline magical. When it is not, I am observed to be “politicizing everything”… which isn’t wrong, that is basically my super power at this point. (Hi, welcome to Jake’s House)

But in trying to square everything in some concise manner so I can enjoy this experience in “relative peace” is proving to be elusive. Our first event, a US Women’s Soccer match in the south of France has already exposed me to the typical US travelers approach to these games. Which is to say, uncreatively, U-S-A! U-S-A!!! As the US women make light work of an African side in Zambia, who some Larry from Huntington Beach described as “drinking Sprite for breakfast, since it is more of a vacation for them.” (I am thankful they didn’t feel compelled to fire up the I Believe chants)

That’s just it, the blind nationalism that only demands victory and less the experience that most other countries probably arrive with, which I hope is the notion of global togetherness over sport. But that isn’t happening, and for those with a critical eye, you find the opposite in abundance.

It doesn’t just encapsulate the most apparent atrocities that are met with double standards, but individual scandals that soil the lily white uniforms of the torch bearers on TV.

Animal cruelty in the horse stables. Illegal drones used to record opponents. A convicted child rapist being allowed to compete. France Muslim women being banned from donning appropriate headwear. These are the smaller potatoes in the backdrop of a games being toted as Equal as glass ceilings over representation are being cracked in comparison to earlier games.

For the real Olympics aficionados, you can and probably do dislike, even hate, the IOC for myriad reasons. It is not hard, historically or contemporarily. But the hardest part of being here and having a historical lens is the frequency that it has already come in handy.

While I don’t feel “muzzled” in the literal sense, I do feel like it is a tightrope to try and walk and then to further voice any degree of pointed dissent. Arson attacks on TGV train lines the morning of the Opening Ceremony have already opened the terrorism discourse up to a discomforting level. The news stories telling of others already detained for making threats online shows the degree of surveillance already in place. And that’s still before I even say the word, Palestine.

Without needing to go much further with specifics, as others have done so more comprehensively and more eloquently than I could, I will offer the one idea I sit with in my own Cognitive Dissonance.

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”
-William Shakespeare, from The Tempest (Act 2, Scene 2)

The strangest bedfellow I have already gathered in the Olympic context for this moment in history is IOC Chairman Thomas Bach. Let’s be clear, the man is condemnable 7 ways to Sunday if you go looking for the dirt, but I want to draw a bit of attention to the notion that these high profile decision makers have full comprehension of the matter at hand, as Bach has held an external position related to German export partnerships in the Middle East that would require some degree, I would argue a full degree, of understanding of the dynamic that Palestine faces now. And yet, no action worthwhile has been tabled.

As others with far greater public stature than I have already made requests to the, supposedly, appropriate bodies to merit consideration for Israeli exclusion, it is now my own mission to trouble the lazy notions of those that might sit beside me. Knowing full well that they are likely not the historian and geographer I am, that is where we make our scratch.

Another quote that Mom and I have considered together on this trip is my long time favorite Twain-ism:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
-Mark Twain, from The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

If I might pick one flower for myself, it is knowing that the broader context in which I operate is for the greater good of the world, and anyone fortunate enough to sit with me in the next two weeks(save for crappy soccer fans doing the wave in an arena 15% full) is getting more than the next, replacement-level, American. Insofar as the Olympic Athletes are at the pinnacle of their sport, you’d be hard pressed to find another American as ready to engage with all the nasty scandal as myself.

And while I have not always been true to myself for fear of how others might react, this passage is hopefully the budding shoots of green growth so that I might return to the proverbial arena, and slowly, cultivate those willing to listen with that bigotry killing perspective.

I end with the seminal Teddy Roosevelt passage, The Man in The Arena, delivered in Paris at the Sorbonne in April 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt, from Citizenship in a Republic

-Jake

PS: One more Paris-relevant, Olympic-relevant quote, is the Olympic creed adopted for the 1924 Paris games:

“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”