Violence & Making the Community Machine Work
Op-Ed
Some nations of the world are demographically well-off, whereas some find themselves in an extremely detrimental situation. Regretfully, Georgia belongs in the latter category. Even more painful for us is that our population is dwindling. In addition to a plummeting birthrate, one of the biggest reasons for our demographic shortcoming is violence which takes the life of a considerable number of people. Cruelty among kids has lately become a very serious problem. It seems to start with elementary bulling, which turns into a crossing of words, which turns into a powerful muscle fight, and finally, knives, firearms and even bombs enter the incidentally begun youth fracas. The result? The dead bodies of the too-young-to-die, bereft parents left in incurable misery, disrupted academic processes and schools with low moral influence and palling educative potential.
The State itself can do very little to save the day. Human aggression is everywhere; brutality characterizes every known culture; hostility is in the nature of man in general; and belligerence is descriptive of the young of any ethnicity. But for us the Georgians, all this is elevated into the rank of tragedy because we are in any case disappearing as a nation through not multiplying sufficiently enough. Each and every life is extremely valuable for us. We cannot afford to lose our young in wars, street fights or accidents. We need to keep every single boy and girl alive, thus strengthening our genetic fund and somehow boosting it, if possible at all with our minimized desire and readiness to survive.
If this is all a given, let us now question the causes and grounds for the violence that is stealing away those valuable lives. There are many players in the vicious game: parents, schools, extended family, circles of friends, internet, the educational system in general, freedom of speech and behavior, the State, the street, opposite sex, and, of course, the character: both individual and national. It would be unwise to blame just one of them. The rationale has to be sought for and found in the complex interaction of all the components together that forge a raw body and soul into a personality.
The main question here is if we, as a modern, democratically-minded society, can manage to keep our kids so busy with academic demands and needs, with entertainment and attractive sporting opportunities, mildly and benevolently fed moralistic precepts and rational orientation on a future good life, that they are no longer preoccupied with distorted relationships or stupid street skirmishes and discussions, overbearing attitudes, muscle brandishing, cruel punishments for nonsense and a constantly misunderstood exchange of epithets.
I understand that no society in the world is free and safe from psychopaths and the cruel creepiness of their behavioral paradigm. Victims of psychopathic assault have always been out there and will always be. I’m talking about the youth whose psyche is healthy and intact, whose character needs but a slight correction, whose parents are good citizens, and whose futures are at stake only because we have not been able to keep them busy in an affordably practicable way.
The above enumerated components of our community, whose direct responsibility it is to produce and bring up a youth which is more constructive than destructive, are not working in unison. Those components are not capable of working in concert so that they represent a meaningful and effective power, directed towards one mutual and appreciable goal: giving a future to this nation. If we need to save the lives of our young men and women, our prospective moms and dads, then we need to make the machine work faultlessly, the machine that has all those components that I think can go in two directions: deadly or life-giving. I choose the latter for us. Otherwise, we can forget about demographic victory over our own selves!
Nugzar B. Ruhadze