The Olympics in Boston

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Last summer I thought the hosting the Olympics in Boston was a good idea. I believed what people said about it bringing funding to improve the infrastructure. I like to think of Boston as a world class city. And, I happen to think the Olympics are really cool. But that was last summer. After this winter and it’s historic snow fall that laid low all the public transportation. I don’t think its a good idea. It’s a horrible idea! You can’t improve the trains, busses and roads enough to accommodate the number of people the games would attract. Sure it might make things better for those of us who live here afterwards. In the same way that the snow which had previously paralyzed our city has made things better for us by melting.

Now it feels like bidding to host the games is more an effort to shush critics of the MBTA by exposing commuters to how bad things could be if you infused thousands of additional people on the system.

It reminds me of the children’s story about the farmer who can’t sleep because of a dripping faucet in his house. When he goes to the wise man for advice the wise man has him move all of his livestock in to the farm house. The farmer moves a different animal in to the house each night and of course he can’t sleep because they are all so noisy. Eventually the wise man has the farmer remove all the animals at once so the only sound is the dripping faucet and it is so quiet by contrast the farmer can sleep. But the “wise man” could have saved himself and farmer a lot of trouble by telling him to fix the faucet.

Maybe instead of filling the farmhouse we should just

“Fix the Faucet”.

Image by Jamie Walsh


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