This is where you tell yourself.. "Do we really want progress?"
I arrived in the USA in 1977. Nike was not even a name then. You didn't go to McD's, and you certainly didn't buy apples in plastic shells..
I arrived in Georgia in 2008, and rediscovered home foods, local markets, simple pleasures. Then, money started talking. The government wanted to put the country back on its feet. A good thing. But with malls and cigarettes?! The best cell phone, the most, the biggest, the ultimate...
And now, it is hitting the world. Kids want the latest, and who could tell them no? But, really, is that what we want for them? Where is the notion of restraint, or control, or just limits.. (2018)
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August 19,
2013
Somewhere,
the children have won…
In the
years since 1991, the children have been waiting. Anxiously, at the apron
strings of their mothers, they have waited for their turn.
It looks
like it is finally here. The children will have a chance, maybe.
Playgrounds,
the laughter of children in the descending summer sun. We, as Westerners, all
take that for granted. What more natural sounds than the laughter of children
chasing each other around a plot of sand with a few toys?
Here in
Georgia, after years of invasion by anarchists, the playgrounds have bloomed
again. And they are well kept, clean and somewhat free of dangerous debris.
They used to be everywhere, before the Great Revolution of 1991, for every
building in the ghetto had his playground. 1991 marked the start of the
children’s prison, inside this society that was more interested in keeping old
Russian cars from being stolen, than to hear the laughter of their children.
They tore the playgrounds down, and replaced them with awful concrete
constructions, just to keep their meager possessions from being stolen. They
took whatever land they thought was needed, without any regards for their
children. They forced them into the same hell as the one they lived in. Nothing
to eat, no job, no electricity, no running water in place of the very
repressive lives they lived under the soviet rule. Back then, everyone had a
job, and everyone had running water, everything was cheap and although main
food items were hard to come by, no one died of starvation. Such was the price
of their non-tangible freedom. With the ease in life came the impossibility of
leaving it, no visa allowed out of communism..
So, when
freedom was won in Georgia, anarchy came with it. Since the Russian umbilical
cord was cut, no help was to be expected from the greater power. When man is on
his own, he growls like a wolf, takes and does not share. Here in Georgia, they
took from their neighbors, they started erecting ugliness in the image of what
had been started and left by the Soviet Union. Tall apartment buildings, all concrete,
never painted, apartments calculated on square meters allowed for each person,
was all that was possible here during the Soviets. And no permitted contacts
with the outside world, they believed it was the way it had to be. So, when
they started tasting their own freedom, they took away the playgrounds from the
children, replaced them with concrete garages made of recuperated steel bars
and other oddities, and condemned the children to a lifetime of anguish. After
all, where do you learn about society and life, if not on the playground as a
child? Where do rules get established? How do classes get built? Where do you
learn respect for your neighbor? The families here kept to themselves and the
children in town never learned the rules, since there were none.
The concrete universe subsists until today. Vast expenses of ugly buildings, all with people living a meager life. The real Tbilisi lives here..
Today, the
generation of children that lived in 1991 is lost. Without a job,
mostly educated, but without aim. They have no hope, they have no future and
they have no plan. One of the main sentences heard here is “I don’t know”. It
is the start of every conversation..They just don’t know. They will go to their
early graves brought on by years of unemployment, stress and lack of health
care. They will never know, for the most part, the joy of being socially
successful, or professionally successful. Because they were not told the rules
of sharing on the playground, you cannot count of them, since they only fend
for themselves. Since they have nothing to claim their own, they go for the essential daily search for survival...but..
.. businesses in Georgia are getting setup on a daily basis. Come to Georgia, they say, and
start a business! No taxes for years! Many big Western companies have bitten
the worm on the fishing line, and Zara, Steve Madden and Carrefour are running
here, among others. Prices are lower than in Europe, since the employees are
not paid so much, and the taxes are inexistent…The president has erected
expensive, showy, beautiful buildings, in order to make them feel welcomed, but
he has forgotten to hire people to clean around them. The cleaning perimeter is
so narrow, you can step from beautiful to dirty and unkept in 10 meters or
less..
And now
comes the conundrum.. How do you reconcile the thousands living in the ghettos
left by the communist powers, who have no desire to share themselves,
their way of living, and their society, with the power of Western civilization
at its worse? The Georgians don’t even want to taste anything other than their
own food, so little interest they have in others. The law of the jungle is
alive and well here. What can be available, money-worthy, and immediate? That
is the plight of a desperate person. Where is the next meal coming from?
Mass
consumption? These people have no money. The shaky government has recently established
that each person living in one of these ghettos would pay 3 GEL per month for
an unending supply of water. The Georgians think that it is expensive, but
claim that now, at least, the water runs all day, and not sparingly, as it did
2 years ago. The price is, at today’s rate, $1.81, or 1.36 Euro, so let it run all day, they say. If a person cannot pay
3 laris (GEL) for water per month, will they really buy a pair of shoes at
Steve Madden in the bran new Tbilisi Mall for 100 laris? What will they do so
that their children can?
Sugar was 1
lari per kilo at Carrefour this week. The masses came. Many came just to buy
sugar, although rice, oats and buckwheat were also available. It is peach
season, and “muraba” is also in season. The world over, we make jam. Sugar is
the drug of the poor. People were fighting to get to it, to shovel it into
bags, since it was sold out of 100kilos bags set in a pile at the entrance of
the store. They were told to not overfill their bags, but, used to having
nothing, they filled them to the rim, for abundance feels good, and were then
incapable of closing them to get weighed. Sugar was on the floor everywhere,
and they didn’t see it. People were rushing and cutting in line trying to get
their sugar weighed by a non-descript, average Georgian woman. The crowd was
getting angry. They needed their drug.
That was,
of course, the way for Carrefour to attract them to the place, and make them
look at the rest. A population that has been used to buying local products
coming fresh from local farms who cannot sell to anyone else, is suddenly
confronted with the world of Nestlé, Coke, Marlboro and Sony. After all, why
couldn’t they buy that for their children? They deserve it, right? So,
Carrefour positioned a very slim, very scantily dressed, young and beautiful
Georgian woman at the cashier's stands, and she asks all the men “Do you need
cigarettes?” You see, she is the cigarette girl. Few are the pleasures of the
Georgians. One of them is nicotine. The second is food. Appeal to their sexual
fantasies to buy cigarettes they cannot afford by the carton..Makes sense,
really..
Sugar, the
great pacifier of the masses. So few people here are obese, that in public
transportation on the way to Carrefour,…, a very heavy man made his way into
the bus. Under American standards, he was heavy, and not obese. When he left at
his stop, the men talked about him as the refuse of society..It will be
interesting to see what the obesity percentages will be in 10 or 20 years in
Georgia. The appeal of ready-made, and somewhat cheaper food at the one large
supermarket Carrefour, will leave its mark, to be sure. Little local markets
that make the foreign visitors take pictures will soon be a thing of the past.
Fresh will be replaced by cellophane goods.
In the
meantime, in this fine little morning, the local little lady announces in the
street “bulkebi ak aris”, or “the sweet rolls are here”. She is a leftover of
the soviet society. All dressed in black, and quite cute in her way, she has
baked them herself in her home, and goes from building to building in this
ghetto where our apartment is, just to earn a living. You see, if you worked
all your life, you get no retirement here. Every person is allotted about 50$/month as a retirement. The Soviets took the work records
with them. No reward for your lifetime of investment. She has to bake to live. Her husband is maybe ill, or dead, so she will do it until she dies..So people will peek out of the window, see the children play on the newly
sanded playground where a covered table and benches have been added to, so that
the mothers can see their children happy in the summer morning, and think
“Well, she is a nice little old lady, but I can buy croissants from France
cheaper at Carrefour”..
I'd rather have the bulki..
How about you?
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