Currently, I do not live in Greece, and therefore, I do not have as complete picture as the people back home on the riots and protests. However, I keep up with the news through services like twitter, friendfeed, flickr, youtube, etc. , listening to SKAI radio and talking to family and friends.
Similarly, the whole planet is informed of the shameful situation and obviously friends and colleagues (literally from all over the world) turn to me for an answer, an explanation, a reason for all this mess?
Well, I didn’t kn0w where to start, and I didn’t know how to explain what has been going on, not only during the past few days, but the past few years that lead to the current events (giving my understanding and interpretation of the cause).
To them, Greece is well known for noble and great things, mostly related to culture and science (inherited almost for free, I would comment) and that makes their surprise great. Considering even the fact that the country is part of the western world, EU member, etc. their surprise becomes even greater.
Finally, today at some point I got it and managed to formulate a simple and condensed response using Greek that most people should be able to understand (if not, follow the links).
“(Malakas politis⊢Malakas politikos⊢Malakas mpatsos)⊢Malakia 3 “
Explosive outcome! To conclude I will simply recall a well known quote I used in a post the day after the last parliamentary elections in Greece:
“People get the administration they deserve“! This refers to all elected social entities from the government and ALL the members of the parliament to the local authorities.
December 13, 2008 at 15:19 |
That was exactly the point of my article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/08/greece
…but people didn’t get it.
December 15, 2008 at 8:46 |
I saw it, it raised lots of comments indeed, it’s sad people didn’t get it. However, I wouldn’t expect much, especially from the Brits. Them above all, should not forget the shooting of the Brazilian “terrorist” in London…