The Games
OPED
The first thing I did when I got home from my long and exhausting Rio2016 trip was to flick through the local TV channels to get back into the swing of political matters in Georgia. I immediately understood how unpalatable the current news was for me after more than a fortnight of amazingly exciting sports at the biggest athletics show in the world.
At the Olympics, you get the impression that the world has stopped, and the only thing that is happening is the Games you are watching and living through. You somehow get addicted to those events, desiring to be everywhere at the same time, which is of course impossible. But in the meantime, the world continues on its regular course, full of routine and triviality, as I discovered when I got home and delved back into te latest Georgian news.
The up-coming parliamentary elections in Georgia have engulfed almost all existent means of mass communication and have quickly dragged me back into the political process that is taking all our TV time, all our energy, wrecking all our nervous systems and consuming all our potential to happily sprawl in front of our television sets and watch something that gives better meaning to our lives.
Both parts of our current existence – athletic and political – are called games, but the rules in the Olympics are so strict and clear that hardly anybody can get away with errors or misbehavior. Not in politics! In politics, you can be blatantly wrong and still have a piece of the cake you are fighting for. In sports, it works like the subtle mechanism of a good Swiss watch. Failures in judgment are certainly possible, but rare, and those failures are punished forthwith via due procedures.
Both athletics and politics are a human creation. Why, then, are humans capable of organizing and conducting the former so well and with minimum failures, and cannot help but be so awfully bad at doing so in the latter? If we had some medals ready – gold, silver and bronze – to note the merits in the field, would we find enough necks among our politicians to hang them on? Unlikely! There are so many recognizable political faces in this country on the TV screen. Maybe even more than on the screens of the American TV sets – a huge political and media market!
Looking at America, what can we see of the political fight for the leadership the great American people are faced with? It looks like extreme radicalism vs. extreme liberalism, doesn’t it? Where is that biblical golden median upon which America was built? And why are the wisdom and subtlety of Georgian political conduct so late to arrive here? Isn’t it high time for us to let it happen? With these words I seek to trigger a psycho-analytical process in favor of elevating the political process in the country to the level of the most progressive political theories and practice. I need the ears that might understand where I’m coming from and the necks on which to hang those medals of honor. There is still time to change. Let’s use that time.
Nugzar B. Ruhadze