antwanpayne.com

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All I have to say to the brave “Students for a free Tibet”… BRAVO!  You climbed 150 feet above the roadway, damn near 400 feet above the bay to show the world that China needs to change it’s policies.  One of the banners read ”One World, One Dream” and the other was simply “Free Tibet”.  Mac Sutherlin, Hannah Strange, Duane Martinez, Alexandra Taub, Thomas Parkin, Tashi Sharzur, and Leslie Kaup, were the organizers of this protest.  Of course they were all arrested by San Francisco Police and California Highway Patrol, but damn what a brilliant job.

Like many other people, I watched the relays in London and Paris earlier this week, and saw what a complete disaster it turned in to.  Really the only word to describe it was pandemonium.  Honestly, I’m halfway expecting the San Francisco protests to be larger than Paris and London.  Come on UC Berkeley… show me your stuff!

Seriously, China has some serious changes it needs to go through.  I’m not going to bash it’s communist/hybrid free-market system, but it’s foreign policy is shameful.  Billions of dollars in the past 4 years spent in Sudan, yet they won’t say a goddamn thing about the genocides in Darfur.  The way the protests in Tibet last month were quashed was even more shameful.  Soldiers attacking monks!

China, this isn’t 1984… It’s impossible to completely block all the media attention.  (They sure as hell tried though: when protesters attacked the torch in London and Paris, media coverage of the event all around China were instantly blacked out).  However, every media outlet in England, France, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Canada, etc. all saw what happened.  If you look on YouTube, there are hundreds of videos that were uploaded in the past 72 hrs.  The more the government of China tries to block media coverage, the more people like me rush to the Internet.

While, I’m not in favor of a complete ban of the Beijing Olympics, I do agree with people asking that President Bush and other US and G8 Government officials boycott the opening ceremonies.

For more information on what happened on the Golden Gate Bridge, SFGate.com has great coverage.

Stepping off the soapbox…
-Antwan L.