This will not be a popular column. (My wife, for one, dislikes it.) The Winter Olympics in South Korea end tomorrow. The Games have gotten too big. Too expensive for most cities to host. And too subjective. The Games -- Winter or Summer -- need to get back to their motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for faster, higher, stronger.

            That means events should be limited to competitions that can be measured with a tape, a scale, or a stopwatch. Or by the number of rocks in a house or pucks in a goal.

            Don’t leap to conclusions -- I’m not arguing against adding new events. The original Olympic Games were limited to what we now call track and field events. Then they added swimming. Rowing. Cycling. Team sports.

            And eventually, curling -- the only sport played in slow motion.

            But notice -- every one of those are won by a measurable finish. I argue that anything requiring judging for style and presentation shouldn’t be included in the Olympics.

Somehow, political correctness has morphed into political incorrectness. It has become wrong to be right.

            Consider Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. During an open house gathering in Edmonton, early in February, he suggested that a woman refer to “peoplekind” rather than “mankind” -- “because it’s more inclusive,” Trudeau explained.

            It was a good-natured exchange. The speaker laughed and agreed. The audience applauded.

            But commentators on three continents ridiculed Trudeau for wanting to use “politically correct” language. Among them, of course, was Donald Trump’s favourite network, Fox News.

           Don’t we get it yet? “Politically correct” language is not a fad. It’s the way we learn and change. The ideas, the concepts -- and yes, the prejudices -- lodged in our brains do not, will not, change until we learn to use different words to express them.

Years ago, someone invented the term “compassion fatigue” -- loosely defined as “indifference to charitable appeals on behalf of those who are suffering, experienced as a result of the frequency or number of such appeals.”

            It has also been called Secondary Traumatic Stress -- a kind of trauma resulting from recurring exposure to scenes of misery and suffering, which leads to emotional withdrawal, to a gradual lessening of compassion.

           Lately, I’ve been suffering a slightly different kind of fatigue -- petition fatigue.

            Every day, my email inbox contains a batch of on-line petitions. They come from Avaaz, Leadnow, SomeOfUs, Freedom United, Change.org -- the list goes on and on.

             The petitions urge me to click, to add my name to the thousands, perhaps millions, who plead with authorities. To free a political prisoner in Afghanistan. To prevent a young boy from being deported to Syria. To prosecute a man who raped and dismembered a young girl in Pakistan. To ban fish farms in B.C. To abolish slavery. To protect tropical rain forests.

 “Why do you keep writing about religion?” one of my correspondents asked. “Does anyone care anymore?”

            Statistics support his point. I’ve written before about plunging membership in churches. In the white western world, that is – Asia and Africa seem to be flourishing. U.S. evangelical churches have been the exception, until now, but surveys suggest their decline simply lags about 40 years behind the mainline churches. 

            But that doesn’t make religion irrelevant. It just means that more and more people aren’t aware of what’s pushing their buttons.

            And their buttons are their belief systems. 

            Which may or may not be what’s traditionally called “religious.”

            Author Ayn Rand called herself an atheist, but she believed passionately in every individual’s right to live without government interference. Her ideas permeate the U.S. Republican party.

            David Suzuki professes no religious beliefs. But in interviews, it’s clear he believes passionately in evolution.

            Carl Sagan believed in science; Stephen Hawking believes in mathematics; Sigmund Freud believed in sex.