Listen to Your Hosts

Lets talk for a moment about the current news that China has decided to uphold their internet restrictions during the Olympic Games.  As far as I can gleen, China has created national firewalls against sites that directly attack the government, such as Free Tibet pages and the BBC.  These are sites that the government has chosen, "Our people should not even see this; we will all be better off without it."

In Cuba, people are not granted liberty.  They can not get on the internet at all, except a .mail.cuba email address, they only have exposure to the government-printed newspaper, Granma, and they can really only vote for the "one party," which is the incumbent, continuation of the revolution.

I am not sure that I can condenm Cuba or China for what they are doing.  Matt Laher on WNYC was attacking China because journalists will not have complete unbridled access to the internet during the games.  But this is ironic, because it is journalists' jobs to choose what information people will see and what information they will not see.  Now they are getting a taste of their own medicine.

I think that the Olympics is a chance for us to accept each other, as nations, for our different customs, religions, and political systems.  China is hosting the world this year, so I think we should go to China, and play by their rules for a few months. It certainly won't kill us, and maybe we'll gain a perspective on different school of thought in the world.  Let's be humble enough to realize that we don't have all the right answers.