Pssst, kid. Want to go to Nagano?
Let the writing begin. But let it be the "right" writing.For the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, with the cooperation of the Utah State Board of Education and its subordinate establishments, bid Utah's seventh-graders to write competitive essays on "The Spirit of Olympism."
The "gold medal"? Attendance at Olympic Winter celebrations in Park City, nay, even in Nagano, Japan, and other goodies and participation for right responses.
Beware. The gold has been debased. It is tarnished and is tarnishing.
It was the SLOC bid committee who three years ago leaned upon an acquiescent Utah Legislature and pliant Utah School Board to forbid further legislative and student debate or discussion on the merits or demerits of the Games.
Its reasoning: The committee was on the threshold of making its bid before the International Olympics Committee in Budapest. There was to be no hint of domestic dissent or disagreement to disturb or dissuade the august IOC of perfection in Utah.
In its urgings and in their acquiescence to silence, the SLOC, Legislature and school board did the unspeakable. They muzzled free speech not only among themselves but among Utah's schoolchildren. They violated an essence of democracy.
History had spoken. But they did not listen.
In 1956, in that very same Budapest, the tanks of the Soviet Union had crushed the rebellion of Hungarian "freedom fighters." The world wept.
By the time of the 1936 Winter and Summer Games in Germany, political dissent and debate in that country had been stayed by deadly force. The world was to weep even more in months and years to come.
How wholesome - in light of the history of the burning of humans at the stake and in ovens, books in bonfires, incarcerations in gulags and re-educations and insane asylums to stay dissent - it would have been had the SLOC bid committee and the Legislature and the school board indulged and encouraged free expression, and indeed detached consideration of the tragedies and triumphs, and the value and the demeaning of the Olympic movement. What a winner for America and Utah.
Listen, kids and teachers. Three years ago, the SLOC determined your silence was golden. Now for pieces of gold, they are asking you to write nice things about the Olympics.
World peace and friendship are indeed values to be sought through the Games. The same and more, however, may be obtained through rather less costly and extravagant glitzy means - student exchanges, travel, youth hosteling, Peace Corps tours - and through the unrestrained expansion of the mind and disarming the heart.
Pssst, kid. Want to go to Nagano?
As Nancy Reagan said, "Just say `No.' "