Let me answer. I'd feel proud. I'm proud that we still can criticize our government any time, and almost any place (not the Great Lawn in Central Park, of course, or outside the actual venue of an event, as police-state thinking chips away at our liberties). Our freedom to assemble and dissent and to use the legal system against our government at all levels has saved us from the environmental destruction now suffered by the Chinese. I'm thankful for the Green Peace volunteers who put their bodies in the way of polluters and hunters of endangered species. I'm grateful to the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the many other organizations of their kind who've worked so hard to keep us all from being poisoned by pollution.

For their troubles, of course, these folks get called wackos and communists and bubble-heads and tree huggers and worse, and rarely get interviewed by any major news organization. But these Olympic games made me more proud of them than Michael Phelps.

If we Americans take away a challenge from these Olympic games, I hope it's not that we win more medals the next time around. I hope it's that we meet the challenge of global warming and become a beacon of environmental responsibility that puts polluters like China to shame. It's OK with me if they're better at ping-pong.

The take-away challenge from these Olympics should not be more medals but more environmental responsibility.