Generally, I avoid anything remotely political here--not because I don't have political opinions, but because when you start putting them in your blog, you tend to attract commentors who write run-on sentences and long screeds without paragraph breaks railing against some evil or other and invoking tons of off-the-wall conspiracies. (Seriously. I once knew a guy who had some ridiculous theory involving George Soros and the heroin trade. Sure hope he's not reading.) I am, however, going to post about the riots and protests in mainland China because last I checked, I didn't notice the Chinese government pitching in and helping out around here anyway, so the hell with them.
Anyway, I was just reading that there was a riot in China yesterday and angry dragon dancers (and sympathetic crowds) clashed with police. Apparently, the dancers were upset that the dragon dance was forbidden in certain areas this year for "security reasons." I don't speak totalitarian, so I'm not sure what that's code for, but apparently people were not happy about this, and the dragon dancers went and dragon danced in the forbidden areas as a protest.
Now I should point out that I love dragon dances. My cousin had one at her wedding, and it was highly cool. (I should point out that we have some Asian heritage, so this wasn't some annoying let's-build-a-rainbow-coalition-of-ethnic-traditions wedding. Alas, she also had a slide show of her life, which was considerably less cool.) So I'm inclined to be biased to the dancers anyway, regardless of the political issues. And it's terrible that people were hurt in the clash betweeen the dancers and the police. With all that said, I think it would be great if more protestors could embrace the dragon dance thing. Living near DC, it's almost commonplace to find your day disrupted by some group with handpainted signs and megaphones protesting this thing or that. It ties up traffic something awful and drowns out your mp3 player (even when you turn the volume all the way up to "permanent damage"). How much better would it be if all of these protestors did dragon dances instead? They could still chant slogans and stuff, but it would be like a Chinese New Year parade every time you ran into a protest. And that would put me in such a better mood about being inconvenienced. Instead of grumbling about the noise and delay, I'd applaud and then consider getting kung pao chicken for dinner.
Just something to think about.
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