Ugly American: Being a good guest is no Olympic Game

Opinion by WILLIAM WILCZEWSKI

 

“You’re a pretty nice guy … at least for an American.”

Those were a few simple words that rearranged my view on many things.

Those words came from a man whose name I can’t remember.

I can’t remember his face.

I can’t exactly remember what led to them.

What I can remember, though, is where I was and why he said them.

The “where” was Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I was a soldier-journalist on the Stabilization Force in war-torn Sarajevo, 15 years after the Winter Olympics were held in the fine, Yugoslavian city.

I remember seeing the tattered crumbling remanence of the ski jump and bobsled courses that, for a fleeting moment, were the stages of the world’s finest athletes—much like Rio de Janeiro was recently.

When my boots touched that same ground in Bosnia, though, it was figuratively blood-soaked after a vicious war that saw human atrocities unlike much of anything that had been witnessed on this big marble of mud and water that we call earth.

Literal unexploded ordnance everywhere was my proof.

I, however, had not witnessed all the bloodshed that came between 1992-95.

I was there at the tail-end of the U.S. military’s presence there in 1999-2000, cleaning up a mess that only the devil himself could have been responsible for.

I would receive no massive scars from my time there, but the locals would not be so fortunate.

It was one of those locals—although I can’t remember what “side” of the misery he was on (not that it matters)—that spoke those words to me on Christmas Eve 1999.

You see, after a few drinks, he had finally confided in me that he had come to terms with our U.S. presence on his land; after years of detesting any other but local forces being involved in the fight for his home.

Worse yet, he said, was the arrogance many Americans had perfumed themselves with while staying in that home.

This has long been the rap of many Americans who travels abroad, whether it’s on vacation or trying to solve a political problem that many see as none of our business.

So, when someone like Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte goes to a foreign country to play a game and displays the same arrogance during a cover-up of his 32-year-old childish immaturity, I couldn’t help but think back.

I couldn’t help but think that he was born in the same year that those Winter Olympics were held in Bosnia so many years ago.

I couldn’t help but feel for the people of Brazil.

Above all else, though—especially after Lochte’s selfish and still-delusional comments after drunkenly trashing a gas station bathroom and concocting a hurtful story to save his own sorry, selfish butt—I can’t help but feel that the Ugly American in all of us is still out there somewhere.

I’m just glad to say that I’m not one of them.

I’m also hopeful that by using Lochte’s example as something NOT TO DO, the rest of us will learn that it’s not okay, either.