Gypsies live in the shadows of their Olympic venues. One can only imagine what would take up in the shadow of billions in wasted buildings here in Chicago. Martin Rogers with Yahoo! Sports tells us:
Four years since the Athens Games, a Greek tragedy is taking place. Incredibly, 21 out of the 22 Olympic venues now lie abandoned and in various states of ruin.
Gypsy camps have sprung up in the shadow of stadiums where the world’s finest athletes once battled for gold. Graffiti is scrawled over the outer walls of many sites, and it has been reported in Greece that upward of $1 billion has been spent simply to maintain these ugly wrecks.
That is Athens’ legacy.
Sixteen days of glory, but at what price? The Olympics are now almost a dirty word in Athens, most regularly used by politicians who use the issue of decay as a powerful campaigning point.
There was an element of tokenism in awarding the Olympics to Athens in the first place, a symbolic gesture intended as a nod to Ancient Olympia.
The Games will never return there. They will not be allowed to, if for no other reason than that the level of public outrage at the grotesque waste of money on oversized venues with no future is extreme.
The answer is clear Chicago, NO Olympics here
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Glad to see you finally got some press in the Chicago Tribune 1/29/09. There are many groups who have serious reservations about spending huge amounts of money for an event that may rob the city of its parks, lakefront and financial resources for many years.
Perhaps you could work with other groups to establish a website and get a mailing list that would rival the 10,000 names the mayor has for his pet project. Even better, raise some money to mount a serious public relations campaign to let the olympic committee know we are allnot in favor of this poorly planned and inadequately financed pipe dream.
The best thing the city could hope for is to loose the Olympics. With major Chicago area employers cutting jobs, how are they ever going to justify contributing money for this event.
This scenario reminds me somewhat of the attitude of the Roman emperors. "Let them have circuses" while the majority of the population toils in slavery.
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