As a country we have been on the brink of the abyss for a while now, but I’m sure we can live with this. What if society is on the brink of the abyss too? That’s something I don’t know if we can live with.
We all have been recognizing it. Me, my friends, relatives, you could hear it been acknowledged by the people at the nearby table at cafes that there would come a day when this whole lie will end. We are not some isolated country, like Australia or something. In the last 20 years we saw all these desperate people, the Iraqis, the Serbs, the Palestinians, the Albanians, the Bulgarians getting through hard times. We couldn’t ever imagine being in their position. We lived with the certainty that “this would have never happened here”. We thought that we’d already passed through all the shit in history, the world war, the civil war, the dictatorship. And that from now on we are on auto pilot and that things can only get better, infinitely. We may have all been saying that this lie will end some day, but we weren’t thinking how it would end. Because we used to think like, ok, we are already the crappiest country in the EU, so things can only gradually get the northern European way. We never thought that there were worse examples to follow. I have a friend in Serbia, and I was telling her about this whole situation. She said: “You worry too much. We had the same problems here and at the same time there was a dictatorship and the NATO bombings.” For a moment I felt lucky.
People are demonstrating, everybody’s mad. What’s worse is that there’s no one to trust. What’s even worse is that from now on, we don’t have the right to decide for ourselves. The prime minister admitted it yesterday in the parliament when the opposition accused him of taking such harsh measures. He said “don’t blame me, blame the IMF”. Basically, we are under economic occupation. As a citizen of this country there’s no way to send any message to the people of the IMF. I can’t vote for them, I can’t vote against them. I can either follow their instructions or leave the country. If chaos prevails, we will probably be under physical occupation too. EU regulations say that if a member country can’t guarantee social peace, then a mixed EU force is liable to put this country under control.
If you ask me, I don’t mind some money taken away from me, but only under the condition that we will set up a really just society. What I can’t stand is to see for the rest of my life all these people who brought us here being free to live among us. People say we should send them to jail, some say kill them on national betrayal. I don’t want them to be put to jail, I’m against the institution of jail. I want the state to confiscate their property and send them to exile. I want them to have to go to another country and earvn their living. If this could happen, I wouldn’t mind working for 10 years in return for just shelter and food.
But right now there’s no self-possesion among the people. Everybody talks about the same stuff all the time, usually they fight. Then they go to the demonstration together and take it all out on the cops. Last Wednesday, 3 people were suffocated to death when a few demonstrators set a bank building on fire. The next day, the cops got unreasonably violent against some peaceful demonstrators. There could have been more people dead, as stun grenades and tear gas canisters were thrown in the middle of the squeezed crowd and people almost got stepped over by others.
Greece looks like a part of land where suddenly 12 million people are trapped in it and they have to find a way to set up a community from scratch. And each one of them has something different in mind, each one gwith their own definition of “victory”. A real-life Survivor reality show.
Let the 3 people who died rest in peace and let’s all of us who go to these continuing demonstrations try to do whatever possible so that no other life gets in danger, at least as long as our own lives are not in danger too.
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