Photo by R Kent
If you haven’t yet read about the protests going on around the world, following the running of the Olympic torch, you can read about it on just about every news Web site. Today the torch will go through San Francisco, and you can read updates here.
I’ve been talking with Tony’s mom a lot lately about the protests, the Olympics and a possible boycott of China. What we all know is there will be no boycott of China. It would be bad for our already crumbling economy. And what would Americans do without all of their cheap goods? American made? Doesn’t exist anymore. Not on any grand scale anyway. But I love that the U.S. government wants to pretend like they just don’t want to get involved in the political affairs of another country. China has gross human rights violations; the recent flare-ups with Tibet are only a reminder of this.
Personally, I have to say I support the protests going on around the world. If I had a car, I’d have been down in SF today getting my protest on with everyone else. I realize that the protests have nothing really to do with the Olympic Games. Who could hate the Olympic Games? Since I was a kid I’ve been in love with watching the Summer Olympics. But when the Olympic Games committee picked China as this year’s host, they had to know people would start paying attention to China again. In fact, they said part of the reason they picked China was because they wanted China to clean up their act and being on the world stage might force them to do so.
China has been desperately looking for ways to cover up its pollution in the past months because it was worried about a public relations nightmare occuring when people all over the world saw their athletes having to compete in the Olympic Games wearing special masks to keep from getting sick from the polluted air. Now, instead of the environmental public relations nightmare they were expecting, they’ve been faced with something even worse. Most people, it seems, can forgive environmental pollution, but the killing of monks in the street is a little bit more difficult to look past (unless you’re worried about an economic crisis that is already beginning, ahem, George Bush, ahem). And so we have the protests.
Tony’s mom and I differ in opinion about these protests. She thinks it’s horrible that the Olympic Games, something that has always been a unifying event for the world, is being used as a stage for protests against China. While I wish that the Olympic Games hadn’t gotten involved, I feel like there would be no other time to put China on the spot. For the most part it seems like we just let China get away with whatever it wants. I don’t know if it’s because we’re afraid of them (either because they have so many people and could form a larger military presence than us, or because of economic concerns) or if it’s just that our government doesn’t care. All I know, is that the governments of this world aren’t going to do anything, so it’s up to the people of the world to protest. And they may as well do it when they’ll have the biggest audience possible – that being the whole world at the moment.
Am I wrong? What do you think? Maybe I’m thinking about this in weird terms.
Also, R Kent posted an article about the Paris protests on The Nervous Breakdown. Go check it out.
