April 9th in Georgia

Georgia doesn’t flourish as much as I remember from our year here in 2007. Today is the 20th anniversary of Russia funding a revolution in Tbilisi, rolling in tanks and taking back its Georgia. Today many people fled to their villages lest something happen again on this day. Ironically as well, today, Saakashvili oppositionists staged a protest against the current government saying that he must step down within 24 hours “or else...” Of course, there was no end to that sentence, but people live in fear anyway.

We flipped the channel between a Jackie Chan movie, Tom & Jerry cartoon and the protests today. I’m not sure which was more comical. I’ve seen them all before too. Jackie Chan was in hot pursuit of some kidnappers, Tom was in hot pursuit of Jerry, and the protesters were in hot pursuit of Saakashvili. The losing political parties from the last election here had banded together to speak out against Saakashvili, but could not decide on one speaker for their interests. Needless to say, they also therefore couldn’t come up with a person to replace Saakashhvili should he actually agree and step down. People proceeded to speak into microphones about how they were sick of the current government, but they didn’t say what they disliked or what they wanted to change. At one point the women in a women’s prison called in to voice their support and the candidate speaking at the time seized his apparent opportunity to express how glad he was to have the women’s prisoners’ support because women shouldn’t be in prison! Another candidate accused Saakashvili’s government of being “fake” or “pretend” but not in false promises, but in waxing false poetry and pretend buildings. He made no sense at all and G suspected he might actually be intoxicated. Another candidate spent some time trying to rally the people by voicing that Georgia isn’t America or many other European countries. I wondered if any of the candidates actually could speak any other language or had ever been outside of Georgia. G re-assured me that a couple of them had, but not many. We eventually turned off the TV as G was feeling a little embarrassed about the display and went to get something more productive done instead.