China or America

Let the games begin. In Beijing China the Olympic games will begin next week and the amount of work and the political chaos that has surrounded them is astounding. The Olympics are an athletic event. The greatest athletes in the world come to exhibit their physical prowess in competition with others in the same sport from other countries. It is not to show which country is best or even to show which country produces the best athletes. It is one person who has worked their personal lives hard enough to be in this competition. And the outcome will determine which individual person is the best athlete. THEY ARE GAMES! I am very angry at those who have used and will use this event to make public their political views to the world. They are nothing more than spoiled children who are throwing a tantrum on an international scale.
There is the group of people who have disrupted the run of the torch for the purpose of protesting the Chinese treatment of Tibetans. The disruptor's were not even Tibetans. Does Tibet even have Olympic athletes? It doesn't matter. The torch run was a part of the Olympics. Now there are Muslims who are threatening to disrupt the games. Only nine tenths of one percent of the population of China are Muslims. So why do they protest in China? Because the world is watching and they want attention for their tantrum. Chinese dissidents are planning to disrupt the games as well. If any group has a right to protest the games it is the Chinese dissidents. But even they are doing little more than throwing a tantrum to get the worlds attention. These are athletic games. GAMES! Let them begin and end peacefully.
This struck me while I was reading the news articles about the difficulties that the Chinese government was having with security. The news article criticized the Chinese government for their crackdown on dissidents in their country. They have locked up known dissidents without cause or trial to keep them away from the Olympics. While I really like the Chinese people I have a problem, and an understanding, of the Chinese government. The problem is that they treat their people like small children. They allow them to do whatever they want as long as it does not disrupt the government. Chinese people appear to have the same freedoms as Americans but there are many things not available to them that are available to Americans. A small thing that I experienced while there was this blog. For the first month I was not able to access my Google dashboard. It was being censored by the Chinese government. You censor what your children watch on TV and on the internet and the Chinese government censors what their people see on TV and the internet. The understanding comes from knowing that there are 1.3 billion Chinese people. How do you manage that many people in such a way as to keep order in your society? Apparently you treat them like children. Chinese people are the most courteous people I have ever met. I think that this is necessary for the same reason. How do you live in a society where there are so many people without having respect for your neighbor. Without respect and courtesy there would be chaos.
That brings us to America. We have only 300 million people. We have all the rights that are available on the planet. We can do whatever we want. But we have no respect for others and absolutely no courtesy. When our forefathers started this country they started something very good but they expected the people to take the rights that they were being given and act responsibly. Well for about two hundred years we did a pretty good job of it. But now we have lost it. We are the most free people in the world. But we also have the highest crime rate in the world. In China they do not use the big mechanical street sweepers that they manufacture for other countries, because if they used them there would be tens of thousands of people out of work who sweep those streets using brooms. In America we employ those big machines to clean our streets. So the people who used to sweep those streets now sit at home drawing a welfare check.
So what is the right answer. There isn't one. Each country operates in the way that seems to work for them. And each has it's problems. Each will have to deal with those problems in its own way and with its own detractors trying to dissuade them from doing it. China must treat its citizens with the same respect and courtesy that the people show to each other and they need to let them see how the rest of the world operates. I don"t see how they can censor them for long anyway. And America needs to figure out some way to instill some of the respect and courtesy in its citizens that exist in the Chinese people.