Georgia On My Mind

So the Beijing Summer Olympics have begun. Who cares about the Games, there’s a war going on in Georgia. To hell with the opening ceremony! On the front page of the papers was a Georgian woman bleeding from the face and crying for help amid the rubble that was once her apartment building. To hell with the Games! Ayn Rand has got it all wrong about war. Not all people deserve the governments they get. Ayn Rand believes the ‘innocent’ should be destroyed with the ‘guilty’ in war, rather than waive one’s right to self-defense and retaliation. Bravo. So the bleeding, distraught woman on the ground is to be destroyed for being a passive supporter of her government’s decision to occupy South Ossetia. That’s Objectivism for you. Sure. Go ahead and attack the most vulnerable among us. It is mindset such as this that keeps the troops occupying South Ossetia and vindicates the bombing of apartment blocks instead of military installations.

The international community is useless. The UN could just as well stand for United Nothings. ASEAN’s ‘constructive engagement’ of Burma’s military junta did nothing more than rationalize the destruction of democracy. Nothing’s right anymore. Everything is relative. People and governments place more importance on feeling good than on doing right.

The Beijing Summer Olympics opening ceremony was not without its controversies either. Imagine you are seven years old and your government tells you that you are too ugly to be on stage for the Olympics. The only way the Chinese government can redeem itself now is by letting Yang Peiye sing on stage at the closing ceremony.

What a moral morass modern society is! Nothing is right anymore. Looking right has suddenly been accorded greater weight than doing the right thing. Somewhere in China, a child is robbed of her only chance of being part of the Olympics because she has a round face and slightly crooked teeth. And to think it used to be a communist country with ideas of equal opportunities and distributive justice.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

- “The Second Coming”, WB Yeats