Georgia, Stop Wasting Time!
Op-Ed
One of the most outstanding characteristic features of a civilized society, as I understand, must be a sense of priority; in other words, the ability to do first things first. I am far from peddling the moralistic agendum at this time, but I am just as removed from being indifferent to what this country is faced with and what its people feel like.
This introduction to the main issue is made so surreptitiously only because I am loath to sound overly unnerved and irate. The world knows us Georgians, if it knows us at all, as talented and industrious people; we facetiously describe ourselves as talented but lazy; God perceived the Georgians as merry-making folks who even missed the event of distributing lands among nations by the He who was eventually compelled to cede His own piece of terrain in favor of the Georgians. Yet, the reality persistently carves our image as a people not using our talent, knowledge and energy to the fullest possible extent, especially the young. Looking around with wide-open eyes, I see a lot of utilizable time wasted on doing things not of the highest preference for the nation.
Let us now throw in a couple of paradigms, corroborating my dismaying idea of our behavioral model in terms of aligning the priorities in the most practicable way: ideology matters and politics is important, but a piece of bread is more indispensable to staying alive, so the priority has to be given to the latter.
Time is not appreciated duly in this society and is not even shortlisted on the roster of priorities; for instance, we waste an unimaginable amount of time on things like wakes and funerals and building opulent graveyards and taking much better care of the dead than of the living; we cruise in our cars idly, often wasting a crazy amount of time and gas on nothing; we party at festive tables for long hours, listening to interminable, boring and not-very-wise toasts; we practically live in traffic jams, political rallies and demonstrations, in endless television discussions, in facebook narcissism and altercations; we stand casually alfresco in towns and villages, waiting for something to happen; we spend hours on end in frenzied debates about the unbearable life the governments have been creating for us since Adam was a boy; in short, we refuse to control time, which certainly knows how to fly.
What gives, folks?! While we drag our feet in angry daydreaming, having no idea of priorities and preferences that need to be conjugated with the god-given time of our life, other civilized nations are handling the problem of my concern with smarts and acumen, building their future without wasting a second. They are aware of the brutal and irretrievable truth that good is created only in time, which has to be equaled with the value of money. And money could be made anytime in any country by anybody, if that body is capable of thinking. Yes, thinking plus action! And the longer you’re not taking action, the more money you’re losing (not my wisdom)! Talent also means a lot, but talent, without a framework based on a properly-built array of priorities, is a squandered treasure. Finally, if my daring and earnest attempt to give this modest heads-up to the nation very apologetically makes any sense on earth, why don’t we take the bull by the horns and learn the art of handling priorities and arrange them in time so shrewdly that things start working and the lasting poisoning gabble about nonsense fades?
By Nugzar B. Ruhadze
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