Our Nervous Life & the Nervous System
Op-Ed
What gives, my friends? What are we so worried about? Why are all of us so jumpy and restless? Is there anything happening to us that is so different from what the rest of the world is experiencing in our tense and agitated times? Probably nothing, except that our national nervous system is not historically used to this much neuroticism, so characteristic to our current life. Take, for instance, our parliament. Why should folks as wise and solid as the legislators almost everywhere in the world are be so apprehensive and fretful in Georgia? Their cushy sinecures are cast-iron stable because of their elective nature; their comfy seats are warmer than anybody else’s in the country; their chauffeured vehicles are fueled with free gas, and their daytime snacks are cheaper than the lunches of all of us working beyond the parliament premises.
Yet, notwithstanding all those fringes, our dearest lawmakers still feel overstressed and look overwrought, and use the harshest possible vocabulary when addressing each other; their verbal skirmishes periodically garnered with fistfights and their mikes pushed around for the graphic expression of indignation about any issue raised on the floor. No, they are not simply worried about successfully handling the agenda on their parliamentary desks: they are vexed for some reason, and maybe for no reason, feeling panicky and uncomfortable when the media pester them for some news-making comment or fact.
Parliament appears as a spacious arena, populated by oversensitive jittery political animals: some of them well-qualified for the job and some still in the middle of on-job training. I have seen frazzled and distraught American senators and congressmen in action, but they look and sound totally different from ours. As far as the country’s administration is concerned, the cabinet meetings are less on display to the public eye, but whenever they happen to be, the uptight poker-faced government members reveal their edgy and uneasy disposition anyway, especially in expectation of a certain prickly question from our means of mass communication, which may turn those bundles of nerves into irritable and distressed figures, involved in a frantic political process which is not very easy to cope with.
OK, let’s leave the parliamentary grounds and the governmental chambers for a while and take to our streets, where angry, impatient and fussy driving is a norm, and where aggressiveness is an ever-present reality. Traffic is a mirror of the overall nervous tension that this nation is suffering with on an everyday basis. Drivers here behave like madly fuming badmouthed gladiators in their internal combustion four-wheel chariots ready to eliminate each other to ensure their own survival.
When in traffic, I myself become one of those overstrained types, beeping, swerving, passing and middle-fingering my fellow drivers, and if compelled, profusely discharging the obscene verbal exhaust that so badly contaminates our cultural environment. Like the traffic, like the nation!
Let us now, for a change, peep into a regular primary school within which the breaks make the most entertaining part of the academic process. Here, when the long-expected interval bell rings, the fidgety kids rush to their freedom like crazy to let the restrained physical energy out in the corridors of the school building. Those restless little devils jump over each other’s heads, trip over the fallen bodies and run around without purpose. The upset teachers and security guards look disgruntled, but their annoyed grownup concern usually results in merely a displeased and short-tempered calling for better behavior – all ineffective. This is likely the root of the irrationally touchy style that has to be taken as the precursor of our grownup behavior when we find ourselves in parliaments, governments, at the wheel and in other walks of life.
Let us now add to those recurring episodes one more experience of our life and the picture will become almost complete – the television, where the stories are often garbled and values confused. If we imagine the entire TV network of Georgia as one big restively talking screen, permanently reflecting the faces of our persnickety interviewers, and the disconcerted expressions of our harassed interviewees, we will immediately understand the natural connection between our nervous life and the nervous system. What is it after all that makes us so hung-up and unreasonable, so much ill-at-ease and irate. Could it be ignorance, non-professionalism, irrationalism, or just genetics and the way we are all brought-up? Could be all of these together!
By Nugzar B. Ruhadze
Image source: hellodoktor.com