I watched the opening ceremonies on Friday night and overall I gotta say it was fairly impressive. It was one of the more interesting ceremonies I’ve ever seen with the olympics and I’m glad that my daughter sat beside me and saw it as well because I think it was worth seeing. The one thing I was astonished by was my mother whom was also watching with us. It was a constant wash of bad comments from her on the state of China.
The first one came in the form of “I don’t know why they’d want it, most of the country has no form of communication anyway.” As if they have less communication with each other really than we do. I mean, yes it is a different country and their communication lines are thusly different, being that they may have communal telephone in some parts instead of a cell phone on every body, but this is hardly a negative thing. And not like you can’t find similar conditions in say Alaska. The form of communication most important is their mouth, and while we like to paint the picture of these people not being able to talk freely, I highly doubt it is really as bad as we think it is.
The next problem… “What happened to all the smog?” Yes mom, like any big city, Beijing has smog. Grats on that realization. However, Mexico City and L.A. are both largely thought to be worse in the smog route than Beijing, though Beijing is no gem either in this aspect.
These types of comments make me angry over the fact that so many people do buy into the propaganda so easily. As if China is really as evil as we make them out to be. They aren’t, they do bad things yes, what country doesn’t? The way I see it, they are just an average country that do their own thing, and because that thing doesn’t entirely coincide with our thing, and often they don’t do what we want them to, they must be the ones who are a big evil empire. As if we don’t commit heinous acts of genocide, censorship, facism, corrupt politics and leaders, atomic power, war for no reason, etc. We are all of these things and worse, we are not ones to judge the evilness of China as we have more than likely committed far worse crimes in the last 50 years, let alone the 200 before that.
I’ve heard many talk about boycotting this olympics just because it was in China. If it were in the US this year would you have boycotted it? I doubt it, and why not? On a global scale, the US right now is likely seen worse than just about every other country on the planet and largely because we’ve started this habit of attacking random countries for no better reason than the leader has a moustache. My suggestion is to get over it and enjoy what may very well be a memorable Olympics.