An Extended Metaphor:

I've gotten into a lot of arguments with my friends about "Free Tibet" clubs in colleges here. My case is this: Allowing Tibet to be its own sovereign nation would not harm China in any conceivable way beyond stinging a few egos, so it really should not be this much of a problem to let the Tibetans have their independence. That's plain fact - Tibet as a region does not provide China any sort of significant economic advantage, people are not flocking there to settle down and create new job markets - in all honesty, the region is largely destitute in terms of capital.

However, where do you as a (usually white) American undergrad come off demanding China concede to your stentorian will? Have you seen what's going on in your backyard, or was the steam coming off of your chai clouding your vision? Before you get all hoity-toity about how Obama's betraying progressive morals by "snubbing" the Dalai Lama in his visit to DC, consider the following:

Imagine you're living on the second or third floor of a high-rise (called Earth). Now, twenty stories up on the opposite side of the building, there's this big man with a huge family who's been helping you get through a rough patch, money-wise. For years he's been giving you cash with the guarantee that one day you'll pay him back.

By this point in your lives, everyone in the building has heard about your relationship with this big man. And everyone (including you) knows that you're not going to be able to repay him any time soon, and that, if he were to ask you for the money now, you would have to sell your apartment (and just about everything else you own) to him and his family, and then some.

Now, say this guy has this one nephew nobody in the apartment talks about. Like your financial dealings with the man, everyone knows the story about the nephew but doesn't talk about it - he's been beaten over the span of several decades and is slowly starving to death. He has the sympathies of every single tenant in the building, for sure, but nobody is certain of what to do.

Out of the blue, the man says he's coming over to your apartment to see how you're doing the following morning. That night, the nephew appears in your living room and asks if he can stay for the weekend. Would you hide him in your bathroom when his uncle comes by, or bring him out to the living room for coffee?

That's all I'm saying.

Item two, to return to my former point, is that you don't see Chinese undergrads holding up banners to "Free Lakota." Who speaks for the dying tribes of First Americans that have been relegated to third-world conditions in the US? Nobody in any college rally I've been to, walked past, or heard about. Why don't we fix that before we get on China's case? But then that would be too practical...

If there's any reason to get on Obama's case, it's his appointment of Larry Summers as director of the National Economic Council. What is that about? But that's a rant for another day.