At times it seems as though the entire world is going to hell and the country is going backward, rather than forward. For a long time, post the Civil Rights movement, the country seemed to be at least heading in the correct direction, even if all too slowly, and reality always worse than appearances.

We don’t even have that any longer. The MAGA movement has put the country into reverse, it was the entire point, “again.”

But one bright spot had been that progress actually had and has been made in understanding our fundamental nature. We have made remarkable strides in LGBTQ rights, courts are starting to treat the drug problem as a public health matter, a medical matter, and not a criminal issue, and finally – finally – mental health has become a health problem, rather than something stigmatized.

In that sense, Simone Biles is a champion, a hero. She was prior to the Olympics, but the strength it took to come out, unapologetically, and say that her mental health wouldn’t allow her to go forward and she had to take care of herself was amazing and brave, an example for boys and girls around the world.

But cavemen like Newsmax’s Greg Kelly see this as precisely the problem. He is a wealthy white man, on top, and doesn’t want to hear about “progress,” the world was better (for Greg) back when he could put everyone else in their place.

From the Daily Beast

Newsmax host Greg Kelly attacked Olympic gymnast Simone Biles on Friday night after Time magazine named her “Athlete of the Year.”

He bellowed, “Time magazine’s Athlete of the Year is Simone Biles. Remember? She quit, she quit in the middle of the Olympics. Time made her ‘Athlete of the Year.’ The world has gone mad!”

He went on to claim that Biles, a survivor of USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar’s sex abuse, “was in a bad mood and just kind of walked off” during the Tokyo Olympics, insisting “she let her team down.”

She didn’t walk “off,” she walked forward. She didn’t let her team down, and most importantly, she didn’t let herself down.

“Was in a bad mood” sounds an awful lot like “Just get over it!” to someone suffering from severe depression, or telling someone to calm down in a manic episode. We don’t tell people with appendicitis to just “get over it” or “rub some dirt on it and get up.”

Thankfully, it is now Greg Kelly who is in the minority, the one with the inability to recognize that “health” begins with mental health and then spreads from there. We all need checkups, and we all get injured. But if we bravely admit we’re hurt, and treat it, one can recover completely. The proof is in the fact that Simone Biles was named athlete of the year.

“This is ridiculous. This is insulting. This is un-American” pic.twitter.com/r12APoPcLd

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 11, 2021

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