Thomas' concert and thoughts on the free press

Yesterday was a spring concert at Thomas's school. I skipped class and went to it to represent the family. Thomas is at the far left of the group, easiest to see him in the first picture, in the big group he is almost cut off. This upper school chorus did a couple of songs, there were drums, xylophones, lots of songs by the little kids which were so cute and entertaining. There is also band music, which was OK...when the 5th grade did their piece I realized that our friend Kate would have been up there if she were still here -- since all of them started learning together in September...

Thomas has really not done a lot of extracurricular activities this year -- we are so far from the school, he gets home at almost 5 anyway. He was in the Chess Club for a while, but hasn't wanted to go out for sports because the format is very competitive. I rode the bus home with him after the concert and I realized that we don't appreciate Thomas enough -- it is a really long ride, and he has not complained much - of course he gets to bring his Nintendo DS to school every day -- which will NOT HAPPEN next year. I think his respect for his teachers has grown as the year went on. They are both male teachers, which was a first for him. There is a lot of homework, it seems, or else it just takes him a long time. He is trying to write everything in the computer this year, which is good since his handwriting is sloppy, but time consuming.

On to our other topic...the idea of a free and open media. I know that you north American readers are so tired of hearing about the US election season and/or the sordid private life of Elliot Spitzer that you are just about ready to give up on the media altogether. I have been having a reality check on that this week. The reality of living in a country where huge events are happening and have to resort to proxy servers, passing around emails and outright hearsay to find out what is going on has really been hitting home. I am sure most of you know more than I do about the unrest in Tibet, which has now spread to some of the places we have visited this year in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. If you could only see some of the patently ridiculous statements coming out of the national media here about the "evil D----L---" (don't want to use any key words here for the firewall, although the blog is already blocked in China anyway). Americans -- I have this message : we should never, ever take for granted what a free press has done for the transparency of our government, and we should protect it at all costs. What the government here is able to get away with in the name of security and stability is really quite scary. Not to mention so poorly done as to defy any thinking person to believe what they have to say. If you don't believe me, try pulling up the China Daily website (leading English language newspaper) and compare some news accounts with those being put out by AP or the BBC. By the way, my thanks to folks like my Dad who have been sending links to articles via email-- I am often able to follow these better than trying to search, because with a proxy server, like anonymouse.org, you can't follow links to other sites very well. I guess CNN ran a story on the "Great Firewall of China" and how experts believe that they (the Chinese government) have never been filtering or shutting down as many sites on the web as they have been this week. Some people with yahoo accounts can't even access their email, and everything is crawling at a snail's pace, as more and more content is being filtered for key words, which many believe are used to either block or increase scrutiny of sites and possibly individual users. Of course the real question -- can the free flow of information really be stopped? My belief is ultimately not--but not everyone has access...