One World, One Opinion

Just in case you didn't know, the Olympic slogan is "One World, One Dream," so now you know the play on words in my title.

With just over a day before the Olympics begin here in China, I'm sure that all you readers out there (wherever you are) are being inundated with articles about Beijing, the Olympics, pollution, human rights issues well basically all the different publications are all saying the same thing. Actually, the most interesting thing about it, is most of these media outlets have sent a couple of journalists out to China and after only spending a couple of days in China, they seem to know everything about the whole country. Now don't get me wrong, is Beijing polluted? Yes. Does China have some human rights issues? Yes. But for all you people out there who have never been to China and are just getting your opinions of things over here based someone's article after spending 48 hours in a country of over 1 billion people and which is, area wise, significantly larger then the US, I would ask you to take a step back and think about who is authoring that article. I mean, my opinion of what China is like has changed significantly over the course of the 2 years that I have been here and the bottom line is that even what I think is only based on my limited experiences and the things that I have seen.

If I told you there was someone from Europe who visited America for the first time, specifically New York City for 2 days and then started writing an article about what America is like and what Americans are like, I think you would agree that there is no way that he/she can write a half decent article about what things are like in the US or what the people are like in the US based on their 48 hours of experience.

Again, I am not denying that there are things wrong with this country and how things work, that is obvious by all the articles that are coming out and saying the same things. But it is probably in your best interest to take some of the highly opinionated articles with a grain of salt because most of these journalists are not really experts. Actually, just keep to the sports reporting and I'm sure you'll be okay.