Olympic Torch Relay

[krasnoludek]

San Francisco officials completely changed the route of the torch relay today to circumvent the protests that were obviously going to happen. It was transported to another part of the city, run for a short distance, before being shuttled to the airport and sent off. It was a completely cowardly act just so that China could point to it and say

Comments

[starfirerapture]

I didn't say that he was a ruling member of China, I said I agree with the correlation - mostly because I was annoyed at the outcome of the day's events.

It was frustrating to realize that the thousands of people who came out to see it (only some of whom were protesting) were shafted. By rerouting it completely, he basically said "Let's fuck over the protesters and anyone else who came out where we told them to go, and send the torch through the rich neighborhoods instead."

The specific quote I was referring to was: "Gavin Newsom runs San Francisco the way the premier of China runs his country - secrecy, lies, misinformation, lack of transparency and manipulating the populace," Peskin said. "He did it so China can report they had a great torch run."

There was nothing specifically mentioned about China's human rights record, it was mostly a social commentary about how shady it was to completely re-route it. I do understand why it was done and it makes sense to want to avoid the likely conflicts that would have taken place, but when tens of thousands of people have flocked to the posted route, and suddenly its changed, it became a situation where only those with cars or those who lived in the ritzy neighborhoods it instead passed through got a chance to actually enjoy the event.