February 16, 2022- Intellectuals love to savage children. It makes them feel oh, so clever-and relieves them of any accusation of being sentimental. Ignorant people love to address children by their surnames, as if they were adults. It makes them feel like they are readying the young ones for a hard world. The insecure, among the older generations love also the see no daylight between childhood and adulthood. It helps them to mask the pain of their own formative years. The greedy love to use children for their own ends-because nothing is more important than stroking their unbridled egos.

My prayers are with Kamila Valieva, that her native talent was disrupted, waylaid, and maybe destroyed, by the greedy among her own countrymen; that she is being held solely responsible for this, by some of her predecessors in the Olympic figure skating realm, whose jealousy is so ridiculously transparent-and justified, to the extent that it is possible to excuse their vitriol, only by the presence of dope in her system and that the cursory reading and viewing public will take the braying of the international sports media to heart-and vilify the girl, for the duplicity and treachery of her handlers. She could have done it all, without the drugs that society loves to hate, but no-once again, the elite show themselves as scorpions, eating their young.

May God bless and heal you, Kamila.