First, do any of us really know anything about the skating world?

Second, the skaters participate if they wish, and don't if they don't. By the time they reach this level of competition, they aren't there to please their parents, and they know exactly what they are in for. They agree to the whole rigamarole.

Later in life, maybe they get to be judges.

In the skating world, as in many others, the judges ("Powers That Be") are balancing a number of priorities against their own leftover bitterness that accumulated when they were "paying" THEIR dues. You should see how it operates when people want to go to seminary! *G*

From the outside of course it looks ridiculous, unfair, whatever-- whatever our mindset on these things is, that's how we interpret what we can see from the outside. But we aren't part of the history. We don't have any idea what those dues might have been, or what they really care about in their field of interest.

Things in any system change slowly. I used to chafe at this. Then I realized that change happens at that rate because it is what human beings can handle, overall, as a system. It's part of species survival.

Last week I realized that, in our denomination, things change in a particular and amusing, infuriating way. Your whole time you belong to a church, you are complaining that things never change in whatever way you'd like them to change (while raging at what others are changing that you hold dear). You may be nice about it or you may not, but everyone who really wants change becomes quite well known for thier favorite area of wishing. And no one wants to go along. Then the person dies, and BINGO! A memorial fund is set up.... to fund, in loving and sincere regard, what the person would most have loved to see in life!

I think heaven is full of people laughing their asses off for this reason. *G*

~Susan