China and the Trenchcoat Mafia

I'm not going to be boycotting the Olympics this year.

Don't get me wrong, I know and respect several people who are going to boycott the games, and their reasons are entirely logical. Let's be honest, when it comes to human rights, China is the bull in the...well...the china shop. Regardless of what you think about China or the Chineese, it's kind of hard to ignore the abuses that its government have managed NOT to disguise, even just in the past few months leading up to the games. Arbitrarily evicting whole populaces to make way for the actual physical plant for the games caps up years of known brutal crackdowns.

However, there is no event in the world that is as symbolic of world unity then the Olympics. As Morgan Freeman says in the commercials, the games are chance for us to forget our differences and come together as humans.

So, therein lies a Catch-22. There are many people who are boycotting a symbol of human unity...in the name of human rights. If you want to watch the Olympics and support international unity, then you're tacitly empowering those who abuse people. But, on the other side of the coin, if you want to make a stand against those abuses, you're turning your nose at the world.

I, for one, am not going to boycott the games. China pollutes the environment and represses her citezens out of a driving desire to become modern, to join the first-world nations in our affluence. Like a high-school kid wasting his money on designer jeans, China is just trying to fit in. It seems to me then, that boycotting the games because they host it can only do one of two things:
A.) China, seeing that it is still not accepted as a legitimate world power, redoubles its efforts, churning out more pollution and repressing more citizens in order to finally gain what it seeks.
B.) China, seeing that it is still not accepted as a legitimate world power, becomes, to continue our high-school analogy, the angry kid in a trench coat. China pulls the global equivilent of a high-school shooting, and, must I remind you, nobody's more representative of "the in-crowd" in global politics than the U.S.

At some point or another, we're going to have to admit that China is going to be a major player in the world, and treat it with respect. The U.S. has always dealt with countries that violate human rights, and the reason is simple: we have to. If the U.S. refused to deal with any nations that repressed their citizenry, it would cripple our markets and open up a host of hostile enemies.

So, if you want to boycott China, go ahead, and all the more power to you. But don't come at me like I'm hugging Hitler if I watch, and don't come spewing out the horrible, horrible facts about how bad China is.

I know. But I'm going to go ahead and support world unity here. Plus, it's fun to watch the Kenyans embarass the rest of the runners on the track.