If wrong is done, it should be punished because justice is justice is justice. As Teddy Roosevelt had once put it, ‘no man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it’. I wish these golden words were true in Georgia. The secret of our future success and prosperity might very well be buried in the depths of this simple but eternal wisdom. You see, Americans have achieved the inculcation of this irrefutable truth in their society’s everyday life. To a considerable extent, though! Why can’t we do the same thing in this country? The answer to this question might need volumes to be fully written up. Alas, the political and juridical tradition in Georgia does not allow the chance.
So far, at least! The elected authorities here, as soon as they get hold of power, they usually acquire access to such a level of supremacy where they become totally unrestricted in terms of making arbitrary decisions at their own unbridled discretion. And nobody knows how this happens, or what kind of circumstance and unwritten law allows this sort of irregularity and unlawfulness. Why is law not powerful enough here to put our behavior together. And when it is breached, why are so many shoulders getting shrugged and so many eyebrows thrown up when the punishment time comes? Can we finally understand that we shall be and should be punished if we break the law? And if we are afraid of a prison sentence, why don’t we refrain from breaking law so massively? This being said, we might need to recognize that the coin has a flip-side too. When the law is broken massively and ubiquitously, we certainly need a lot of things to provide for, like judges, lawyers, police force, courts, transportation means, prison space, food and what not. If we translate all this into money, we might become prodigious spenders with so many arrests and imprisonments. Could there be any golden median in this part of our life? How far can the arrests go without a considerable harm to the country? Don’t we have some feelers out there to let us know where to stop? You break the law, you go to reformatory, but the problem is that too many people break too many laws in Georgia. So what to do? Here is one of the ways out: let us get together somewhere in a big field – hundreds of thousands of grownups of our motherland – like we are doing during our habitual revolutionary manifestations – and make a vow that we stop breaking law so unscrupulously and profusely. I know why you are laughing because you think I am joking. True, I have tried to make a little joke out of what I am seeing around, but what else can we do? Otherwise, centuries might pass in belief that the law-breaking-and-punishment game is a regular thing in our national culture. What we might get eventually is splitting up our society into two basic categories: law breakers and law enforcers. No other segments of society needed! Who will then produce food? Who will run economy? Who will be teaching, or building or cultivating land? On the other hand, life might get simpler with that funny model: you break the law, I take you to prison; then we turn the tables for a change – I break it and you get me there. Easy, isn’t it? I hate my own jokes about the situation, but how else can I get the pain off my chest? The absurdity of the situation is strangulating us. All those people who are breaking the law and all of those who prosecute them can be harnessed as a national potential of creating wealth, but that power is pummeled into a totally wrong direction. Well, every nation needs to maintain and tolerate that non-productive part of society, but not in numbers like here in Georgia. We are all familiar with the ways of running a state. What we lack though is the knowledge of how to avert harm. Sense of prudent moderation and constraint might help, if we can find it somewhere!