As our Olympians prepare to represent the United States on the most grand of sporting stages, they could use some perspective and a dose of humility, lest they give new meaning to the term “ugly American.”
Worries about air quality have swirled around the Beijing games like the dark plumes of smoke from Chinese factories captured in endless pre-Olympic news photography. Fearing adverse health effects from polluted air, some of our athletes have vowed to wear the top secret carbon-filter masks they’ve received from the USOC at all times outside competition, including during the Opening Ceremony.
Can’t you just see it? As delegations from Argentina to Austria enter the Olympic stadium with the widest of grins telegraphing their exhilaration, the American team will look alien and cold, their emotions concealed behind these masks. They will be seen not to parade in peace, but to march in defiance of a country they’ve deemed unworthy. Triathlete Matt Reed may have best captured the sentiment when he called it “just disgusting what they’ve done to that part of the world.”
Before they stand in judgment, our athletes should be reminded that just a century and a half ago, our cities too were smothered in smoke. Charles Dickens described the cityscape of America in his Hard Times: It was a town of machines and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled.”
But the factories that clogged our cities in soot produced a period of economic advance exceeded only by the recent economic gains in China. Our industrial revolution set America on a path of growth that affords Americans today the opportunity to be more worried about clean air and climate change than hunger and disease.
It is asking quite a lot of China’s parents to subordinate the nourishment of their children to the environmental sensibilities of a country that hasn’t known significant poverty in more than 50 years. Forty million Chinese children are estimated to be malnourished. Per capita income in the US is eight times greater than that of China. We had our industrial revolution and, now, with median household incomes of $45,000, can afford the luxury of heightened environmentalism. China, too, deserves a chance to lift its people from poverty.
And lifting it is. In the past 30 years, 400 million people have been lifted from poverty in China—more than the entire population of the United States. Even amid all the pollution, life expectancy in China has increased over the past decade. Healthy life expectancy has seen similar gains. Per capita income more than doubled from 2000 to 2007 and poverty has fallen to less than 10 percent from more than 60 percent in 1970.
China is quickly becoming an economic power with sufficient might to address environmental degradation and clean up its mess. And certainly on other political scores, the Chinese regime can be criticized. But before our American heroes march into Beijing with righteous indignation, they should remember that America’s great cities were once cloaked in smoke from factories that built for us a better future. Let them remember, be humble, and bear their proud smiles to the watching world.
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