Turns out
Michael Phelps got suspended for hitting off of a bong. From the article:
...we decided to send a strong message to Michael because he disappointed so many people, particularly the hundreds of thousands of USA Swimming member kids who look up to him as a role model and a hero...
What? A role model and a hero? Are you serious?!!? More importantly, are you high? If you want your kid to take after a guy who's spending 6 hours a day swimming in a pool (since he was in his teens), eating like a fiend, and selling his soul to advertisers as his day job (i.e., "he's a role model"), well, perhaps you're stupid enough to believe he should be punished because he took a hit off a bong after "work."
(continued)If you think he's a role model, then use him as
your role model before expecting your kids to do so. Perhaps then you'd realize that a multi-record-breaking-gold-medal-winning olympic athlete might be trying to say something: "I can smoke pot when I'm in-between olympic seasons and still knock the crap out of the competition. In fact, it's so non-addictive and non-dangerous I can do it in moderation and it doesn't affect me in the slightest except when the media goes batcrap insane. Please consider legalizing it unless you want to thank me for my hard work by sending me to prison."
He is not your personal crotchfruit-rearer. He has no responsibility to you to embody whatever it is that
you think he should be. He is a human with a life. He deserves a break. Maybe if you would quit being douchebags and take a hit yourself you'd realize that your role model might be onto something and that it's nothing to get sand in your vagina about. From there, you could use that as a talking point for having an honest discussion with your kid about drugs, their future, and whatever else pops up.
For once quit expecting an athlete, a politician, or the government to raise your kid. Grow a pair and do it yourself, because
you are one of the only
real role models your kid is going to take to heart.
Society
en masse seems to extend "role model" to include all elements of the role model's life. They expect perfection where there can none. When the inevitable falls from grace occur, there is disproportionate backlash where the punishments outweigh the crimes, which is justified by biting the hands of the very role models that allow us to suck, like blood-thirsty leeches, from their dedicated spirits—all so that we can transmit to the proverbial "children" pseudo-resolutions to false dilemmas founded on moral ambiguities within a construct of our own pure fantasies.
It's poetic, then, that we doom our children to the same fate as our role models: we let them take that same fall from grace, bite their hand when they can't live up to the impossibly high bar that we set for them through our role models, blame
them for their failure to meet
our goals— that is, their failure to make into reality
our dreams— and finally we punish them disproportionately by haunting them with it until the day we die (or our children kill themselves for becoming the "useless failures" that they think their parents think them to be).
Given all of that, I can't help but think that the world would be a better place without "role models," so if the only reason we're punishing Phelps is part of the same underlying reason we're upset that our children haven't become the proverbial millionaires we had expected them to be, then I think we need to do the following:
LEAVE THEM THE FUCK ALONE—ALL OF THEM.
...but I could be wrong.
