At nine am today here in Calgary I expect to be able to watch the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympic Winter Games in Russia, where it will be eight pm at that time. A time difference of eleven hours means as many time zones, each fifteen degrees in longitude wide, result in 165 degrees east ward from here. One more time zone east would take half way around the world and at twelve hours of time difference!
I hope all goes well for the Russians, who certainly deserve it after the boycotted games of 1980, when the former USSR invaded Afghanistan with the purpose to countermand the rising tide of Muslim self awareness. It was not until 2001 that the US lead West and UN finally recognised that same threat, but then only after the destruction of the US business centre in New York City in September of that year.
Today we live with the very costly after effects of the short term policies of those times. They were largely based on the idea that those remote areas and its people could largely be ignored, as they were powerless to affect the West.
This turned out to be a severe miscalculation. After having been trained in guerrilla warfare by the West and motivated by a radical cultural identity belief, the modern fighters proved as cunning and resilient at their Parthian forefathers in Antiquity.
You could see the above mentioned chain of events as a process that is part of our human society becoming more integrated. The start of it can be found in the age of explorations and discoveries dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after Zero; the year null that is, in our modern count.
>8:01am
I just checked CBC TV and learned that the opening ceremony starts at 20:14 hours - this the 2014 Olympics - from the commentators who are busy talking the time away. They reword opinions, criticism and observation voiced earlier in the days leading up to this opening event.
Listening to this over the last few days, I have become surprised about the darkness in Mansbridge’s reporting which does not tire of emphasising the security threats, the gay and lesbian issues, or the moneys spent. I guess the CBC would like some of those rubbles, in these their lean Harper hampered days.
My view of Russia is a bit different, in that we have the Russian nation celebrating its remarkable recovery and transformation from the 1989 collapse. In our ‘Western’ society this is barely acknowledged or understood, while we are busy criticizing differences from our own ways. I think we are dealing with a case of the West being envious of Russia’s status in the world today and the West attempting to minimize that.
China’s president is there and so are many other nation’s leaders. They must recognise the new reality of the example that Russia has come to represent in emerging from and shaking off a very difficult past. I would call Russia’s transformation since 1989 revolution-redux, referring back to 1917 and Peter the Great before that.
There is no process in the ‘Democratic West’ that comes close in scope to Russia’s change over, which may be due to the nature of the democratic process. However in it, I see an over emphasis on consumerism and capitalistic materialism, ever since the USSR crumbled in 1989. Instead of a willingness to now be more magnanimous, we witness the West’s concerted attempts to dominate less powerful nations and people on our common planet.
The planet Earth’s living regions are our 'commons' and their abuse has consequences for all to bear.
The planet Earth’s living regions are our ‘commons’ and their abuse has consequences for all to bear.
<8:43am time to turn on the TV! I did and now I close at 5:28pm!~