Beijing 2008

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Beijing 2008: A brilliantly colored window to understanding?



By Ivy Lee - Special to The Bee
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Story appeared in CALIFORNIA FORUM section, Page E3



The coming-out party is over.

Sitting in front of the TV, I forgot for the moment the cacophony arising from various quarters to condemn China for the "broken" promises it made to win its Olympic bid in 2001.

Forgotten momentarily was the media coverage that revolved for weeks around Beijing's smoggy skies. China does have a problem with environmental degradation. Whether seven years of hard work could reverse the pollution accumulated in its headlong rush to industrialize is questionable.

But China has the hubris to promise, and judged it must be on those terms.

So the media flooded the public with images of the murky soup Beijing calls sky, while the fact the Chinese government has planted thousands of trees and permanently closed or relocated many polluting factories was mentioned as an afterthought. Doubt greeted China's efforts to seed the clouds in the hope that rain would clear the air. The impact of such media coverage was abundantly illustrated in the four U.S. cyclists who sported masks when deplaning in Beijing, apparently unwilling to chance a sniff of the poisonous mix even indoors.

A few days before the cyclists landed, the Climate Group, a tax-exempt organization in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, issued a little- noticed press release to report that China "has a strong and comprehensive low-carbon policy framework in place." The country "is overtaking more developed economies in ... creating green-collar jobs and leading development of critical low-carbon technologies."

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Despite strict statements made by the Chinese government that it will not tolerate evangelism during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, many Christian athletes are planning to share the roles God has played in their lives. Section 51 of the Olympic Charter states, no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.
Unfortunately,the Olympics become a worship of man, the worship of his body. The Olympics is a sports fair, a flesh fair, flesh peddler.The worship of the body! It's very sexual too, as you notice, all these things are very sexy. Sports glorifies sex, but at the same time belittles it and pretends to dislike it. The ultimate manifestation of all of these is War!--His physical prowess, his mechanical ingenuity, his tactical genius and his indomitable spirit. See how this competitive sports thing has been the final stages of every great civilisation and empire!
Ted Rudow III,MA