Apparently Lance Armstrong is being sued by the US Post Office for about $100 million.
Why, you ask?
Because the cash-strapped Postal Services managed to scrape together $40 MILLION dollars to sponsor Armstrong for bicycling around the world.
In a world where kids barely out of adolescence are bombing us, we’re engaged in one war while another nutjob in Korea is waving nuclear warheads around like candy cigarettes, and all of the other insanity on earth, this just boggles my mind. I’m not angry at Armstrong because frankly I think he’s a fall guy in every sense of the word. I don’t think this lawsuit should be aimed at Armstrong. He may have “doped” for his races – find me a truly astonishing athlete who hasn’t augmented their performance in one way or another and I’ll eat my hat – but who was actually harmed by what he did? Tell me which child lost its arm/leg/hair/fingernail because of Lance Armstrong?
Well yeah, people were hurt indirectly by Armstrong, just not by his doping. US taxpayers shelled out $40 million to sponsor a team of bicyclists. I don’t remember volunteering for that. Do you? It pisses me off in a big way. The money could have been used to keep post offices open that are now closed, at the very least. It could have been used for health care for children who don’t get it now. It could have been used to feed people who are legitimately in need. It could have paid a hell of a lot of unemployment checks that ran out, dropping people out of the official unemployment figures regardless that they’re still not working. It could have been spearhead money to plug the hole in the mental-health dam.
But no: our benevolent leaders – and yes, I use that with all due sarcasm – felt it was wholly appropriate to pull a reverse Robin Hood by robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. Because lemme tell you, Armstrong and his cronies ain’t hurting for cash, not with sponsorship at that fiscal altitude.
You want a lawsuit? We the People should sue our government for its open and heinous contempt toward its average citizens. It’s obviously not going to happen because the foxes are in charge of the hen’s house. That, and the government’s already spent our money to the point of financially gutting the next sixty or seventy generations. Even if we sued, we’d be stealing more from our descendants, who are already screwed. Our kids will pay, and their kids, and their kids and their kids’ kids and so on to perpetuity.
A sad personal side-note: just a couple of nights ago my older daughter and I were talking about an old boyfriend of hers, back from when they were kids. Mike was rough then, and really did some stupid things as he got older and was sent to prison several years ago. My daughter was long past being in boyfriend/girlfriend territory; she still kept up with him for a while because she was the closest thing he’d ever had to a positive relationship. She’d lost track four or five years ago, maybe a little less.
He was never my favorite person, but I remember the kid he was, any potential cut short by a mom who was an addict and a prostitute in a small town. This Sunday he was murdered. What the article doesn’t tell you is that it happened while he was on the telephone with his mother.
I am not sorry the young man was in prison. It was a direct result of his own actions. He may have done something while there to deserve killing: I don’t know. I just hate knowing that we in the US are constantly expanding our prisons and completely ignoring the kids when they’re young enough that some genuine care could make a difference. What would have happened with the right intervention for the brothers behind the Boston bombings, back when they were still kids? We’ll never know, and no political hack will ever acknowledge that what happened with them, and with Mike Lynch and so many others like him, was and is society’s failure.