Wires

Genocide?

I read somewhere, a while ago, that a Greek woman and her daughter sued the Greek government at the european court, for the genocide of its own people. I don't know if it's true, but whenever I mention it to somebody, it brings tears to my eyes.

It's like we're blinded by the debris of out collapsing society and the smoke coming out of our mistakenly sacrificed moral values, and simply can't see that people are dying.

Driving to work, on a sunny day, listening to the radio, a man had just shot himself in Syntagma Square. My blood chilled. Everything felt wrong. You go to work, earn some money, talk a few nonsense with your colleagues, dip into some office intrigues, and then you remember, a man ended his life a few hours ago. Where am I in all this? Why does this feel so big and yet life seems to go on as if nothing happened?

A week later, someone I knew hanged himself. Debts, says the official report. I got so drunk that night. Because he was the father of a little boy I dearly love. And because the mother, who is my oldest friend in the world, would have to tell him. I tried to memorize the funeral, in case he wants to know when he's older. We could tell him, your father was one of the victims of the Big Crisis. Like it was yellow fever, famine, or a war.

About a month after that, a man pushed his elderly, senile, mother off the roof and then jumped, too. He had property he couldn't sell and had no cash left to support himself and his mother.

There are hundreds of such examples, from all over the country.

Add to that the cancer patients, whose medicines the Greek National Health System has stopped providing for free. How long will the poorer ones last? Add to that the patients with terminal diseases in the understaffed institutes that are running out of food and medicines. Add to that the victims of violence.

Doesn't it now begin to sound a little bit like a genocide?