THE WINTER OLYMPICS begins this week in Beijing, and that is a harder sentence to process than it might seem. For some, the first few words — the Winter Olympics begins — matter most. For others, the last few — in Beijing — hang heaviest.
For most of us, though, the feeling about this Olympics is something in the middle. Our love for sports and competition, passion and glory is deep and abiding … but is also not enough to completely divorce a spectacle from its surroundings.
So the conflict we all face right now is this: Can we be glad that the world’s best athletes are gathering to show their incredible skills on snow and ice? What if we know that to do that, those athletes have to go to an authoritarian country where, while they’re skating and skiing and sliding, there are — according to human rights groups and nations including the United States — brutal crimes against…
