Just watched “At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal.” on HBO, it had recently appeared on the list of shows.

I guess one snide comment one may have is… oh so that’s how the Americans win their gold medals? Not by a thumb up the butt but a thumb up the vagina!? And wow, that’s no joke… the olympians were not able to escape the horrific experience under USA Gymastics team doctor Nassar’s care. And Michigan State University(MSU), ouch!! Who’d ever send their kid to that university again? I mean, I grew up in State College Pennsylvania, and I have to say, Penn State is still not within consideration… after Joe Pa and Sandusky happened.

So, snarky thoughts aside, where did the FBI go? Most of these events transpire post 9-11. America was a monitored state. We have,… well, tax payers are made to believe that we have sophisticated infrastructure to track digital communications and metadata. Did no spook track this doctors phone calls and sms text and Facebook postings? How come the FBI or NSA didn’t have something that flagged this man? Furthermore, we are often blasted by news headlines of the SEC or IRS reading private equity trading records, private emails and private search logs to gather evidence of a crime in weeks to months after they are committed. How come the same technology did not flag this perv perp? If SEC knows to watch insiders of major companies for insider trading, how come there is no organization to watch major youth sporting organizations and persons for offenses against innocent youths??!!! Is it because there is no money fine to be made that the effort was not justified?

My daughter is involved in a different competitive sports, not gymnastics. She practices at a club now. I have to honestly say, due to the pressure of selecting potential athletes and the need to select the best and train them to be the best, the team does have to process a lot of potential athletes. The coaches have to herd dozens of kids around and make sure they’re all working in an proprietor manner. It is not realistic to expect that they be able to protect the kids at all times.

It’s not even realistic to expect them to protect kids from interference or physical violence by competing team coaches. It is just too messy, the competition space. And plus my teams coaches risk blowback from the other team, as accusation can easily be made in reverse and nobody is the wiser with hundreds of athletes competing in half a dozen teams in the confines of half an acre of space… everybody can say everybody else interfered and physically hit everybody and they wouldn’t be that much less right than my complaint.

I mean, I hate the way things happened in USA Gymnastics… and certainly I had been pushed towards Second Mile(Sandusky’s nonprofit channel for recruiting boys) when my dad signed me up with a big brother at the Big Brother and Big Sister program. Lucky to miss that fun, and got a really nice big brother who helped me a lot in developing intellectual curiosity…

But I kind of also see it from the athletes who actually wants to protect him… it is really hard on the coaches, the various organizations. Because they do have insane pressure to win. And.. I mean I really am grimacing when I write this, because many victims were children, but maybe sexual massages does improve physical abilities? I don’t know! I’m not a doctor… but hey, they did get gold medals right? If your livelihood depended upon it, would you really mess with it?? Maybe biting the nail and just toughing it out really is the best way to make a great athlete? I don’t know, I’m not an athlete or trainer. And to get in on the awesome physical exercise, you have to be part of this jock world–women jocks too.

(As an aside, I think Asians tend to believe mind and body spent on sex is mind and body not spent on exercise. Translate to science, for example, if the ATP went to convolution of muscles in the sex organ, that’s ATP taken away from tumbling or sticking landings)

(Also, another aside, I think most Americans believe that sexual proclivity improves everything in life, including sports. There’s this rumor that documentaries spread about the CIA encouraging sex between its agents… maybe the FBI believes the same? Maybe they feel that they knew for a fact that the sexual abuse was making these kids better? We will never know for sure what went into these decisions, but one can speculate… maybe because FBI/NAS or whoever else was monitoring these signals really believed that he a patriot serving the US of A? We have no visibility into these matters. And maybe somebody we elected ran an oversight committee to watch the clandestine organizations, but sorry, they failed miserably if they let FBI/NSA fail at alerting on this matter much earlier… unless our elected representatives also free sexual expression, even on kids, is the patriotic practice? In that case, IMHO, we have made bad very choices during elections. Coaches are just private citizens. They can commit crimes. When it happens on a large scale for decades to highly visible people, law enforcement has to take some of the responsibility.(and one wonders if the silence of FBI was an indication of knowledge of the matter?) Who claims to be responsible for ensuring domestic tranquility? This seems like a gross intranquillity to me! And because The USA Gymnastics represented the people of the nation, it was federal matter and within jurisdiction of federal law enforcement. A real red blooded American would have done something about that.)

(First, I need to disclaim that I am not a fan, member or a recruit of any communist, or socialist, political organizations. Hehe, you’d laugh if you knew which day I was writing this on… a little flash back. The president is in the middle of a trade dispute with China and has issued an ultimatum that he has the power to carry out. Last day, less than 24 hours before the tariff rises to 25% on all Chinese imports. The two parties are both on his back with various proceedings to discredit him. Like, my uncontrollable thoughts are that if these domestic politicians antagonize Trump enough that he can not recover. He can play this trump card and just fuck the world up. jesus fucking christ! Who’s going to chicken out? I can’t imagine Trump chickening out, and China has a dictator for life, he can outlast Trump to have the last laugh and we all know Chinese dictator-for-lifers would do what pleases themselves at the cost of their people’s lives–they’ve done it for many millenniums. Who will launch the first missile? Will anyone be around to read this blog entry? Hello? AI, please write some kinda words for me and my family…

Hey, what happened to privatized effectiveness? All those athletic companies depending on US elite athletes for branding and advertisements, all those companies paying money to these, or any American athletes, why didn’t they do their due diligence? Why didn’t they have private investigators making sure things are working out? There has to be something wrong with our capitalism if the force of money did not motivate sponsors of athletics to act to detect and prevent these transgressions. For so many years. I mean, for god sakes! Buy some fucking insurance and let the insurance companies figure that out–and that would have led to premium increases that would have made sponsoring these people and schools unprofitable. I mean, god, I am just falling to pieces watching this show. As I understood it, my comfortable American way of life is assured by these clandestine actors working in concert with the invisible hands of the market–something so bad cannot happen for decades on end! Oh my fucking God! How can this be? This is shaking my faith in all.)

Man. I used to think I knew what was right and wrong in the world… but now looking at this… one questions what is the goodness of right, if the right can not be had? If everyone in the whole fucking organization is like that and condones it and fears change, if the FBI bounces complaints, and if the USA national Olympic Committee cannot handle an issue when it got big,… what hope does any one person have?

Sure after decades, some one luck out and makes it all the way through the complaint. But, I mean, think of that girl, who’s dad finally committed suicide after realizing he wrongly disbelieved his daughter of sexual abuse complaints for a decade and shaming her about her complaints. That is total and utter destruction of a person and her family. Wow, what hideous crime.

How does our nation go on with any pride?

Many coaches may hold the believe that sport is just sport, it’s nothing greater than the exercise of the body. Yes, really, it’s all about techniques and how to physically perform better. Mental training is more for moving muscles better than for betterment of the mind.

But sports represent a pursuit of something idealistic to me: Citius, Altius, Fortious: Faster! Higher!! Stronger!!!

It is a pursuit of a spirit, the exercise of the body renders a likeness of a spirit that we love. I relay this experience to many…, and once more here. Once I saw an opposing club’s junior athletes compete in a speed competition. Sports unnamed to protect the interest of all involved… he really sucked at the sport, probably second time he’s ever done the distance. He struggles, and man, you would not believe how pathetic he looked, and his time was like twice as slow as the person ahead of him. And then… as he flailed his arms and legs, about to fall, his whole team, coaches, of all levels, his senior teammates who are very elite competitors.. his jock coach whose been screaming this whole competition at the top of her lungs like one of those menacing ancient barbarian warriors, … the people who competed against these people, and their coaches and parents,… they all quiet down and got together and cheered on this young boy, about to complete the very first race of his career… and everybody thought and felt the same loving support of this sport, keep going! Keep going!! Keep going!! And we all cheered him to the finish! Wow! That was such an uplifting moment… we were all standing, at the edge of the… field of race… and we were all cheering his big finish! And we were all overjoyed to see him succeed! It was as if we were all part of that success! We all won that one!! One of our own won!!

That is the sport!

That is winning!

Yes… I hear my own teams coach deriding me now… in my own head: “hey if that’s how you want to win, be my guest…, but if you swam on my team like that, you’d be gone in a second…”

I guess I’m failing at communicating what I love about the sports…. to the mini-coach in my own head.

Anyways… I hope to find the courage to redefine for myself what is right. To what length we should go towards what end. And how that can play out realistically.

What is the good of a right that cannot be? What is the evil of a wrong that must be?