Dark Days

Well, the title says it all.

A year ago, I had written an article, called “Η κρίση των ιδεών”, written in Greek. It translates to english as “The Crisis of idea(l)s”. Ι had epxressed my concerns about what the oncoming economic crisis in Greece, stating that the crisis had deeper origins than economic ones. Now, I have come to the realization that I was right all along, but I am not hapy with it.

Greece ended up being in this situation because we, as Greeks opted to think ourselves as descendants of ancient Greeks, and not as parents for the next generations, who have no similarities whatsoever to their ancestors. We chose to hide our problems in the past, so that we can blind ourselves from the reality of the present, and that reality is what we are currently live in.

The reality is that we don’t have the money to go out anymore, and have fun. Many people don’t even have money to cover their basic needs, such as food and electricity. And as much as we would like to point our fingers to our politicians and the government in general for this mess, if we want to find the real guilty for the situation, we only have to look into a mirror. We are all responsible for this.

Think of it this way: People asked for money without having to work. The government, hungry for more voters, responded to that request by opening jobs into government services. Jobs whose salary was to be paid by loans from the European Union. In short, people were getting paid with money that the government didn’t really have. The lack of fear of losing these jobs, brought these people the lack of concience of what they were doing. This concept kept going on and on, until the government themselves became a puppet of the same people they are paying. And this percentage of the greek people is so great, that we can already talk about a currupted government system, that needs a full reform, from the ground up.

Let’s not kid ourselves, we had it coming. We asked for it, without even realizing it. We are the same people that hept voting for the same politicians over and over again. We demanded change in the educational system, but we started striking against those changes when the benefits of the few were affected. We needed more and free markets,  a good and fertile ground for startup companies, but at the same time we have cartels and deals under the table that work against those notions. We saw the people we voted for lie in front of our eyes and we did nothing about it. We still see the same people practically laughing at us, and we still believe that our problems will be solved by govenrnment initiatives in some kind of magical contract signed with our European partners. Partners that are already pissed of with our lack of determination to improve ourselves and our country, and have spoken in front of our eyes about their money being intented for economic aid, and ending up consumed for the interests of the few (which are many, btw).

We were seeing all these things and we knew that the day would come that we would be called to pay the money we took. I can’t think of any reason why we should be complaining right now.

This is not the Greece I was raised to believe in.