Katerina Blogs: ‘We didn’t start the fire’

Last night, the Greek ‘parliament’ voted a new bill, imposing new strict measures to the already poverty stricken middle class. All this, to approve a new loan that will pay off the interest of the previous one and might as well help cover the pensions for the coming month (?).

And of course Athens was set on fire once more. At least this is what the world saw. A burning city and in the role of Nero a handful of hooded (some say anarchists, some say cops disguised as anarchists, some say far-right extremists). But what the world did not see were the thousands of everyday people, peacefully protesting, hoping that maybe the last minute, they could prevent what was coming. These were just a few, that had the courage to protest. Because the rest, perhaps the majority, are still numb and afraid.

There is a lot of fear right now among Greeks. Fear of what is going to happen. Fear of the unknown. And this is part of the blackmailing the ‘government’ does. ‘We will go bankrupt’, ‘We will get out of euro zone’ ‘We will not be able to pay your salaries’ ‘This loan is the only solution’ and so on. People do not know how to react. And honestly they are worn out to do so. The typical, maybe stereotypical, Greek temperament is gone. People are tired and hopeless that something can change. They lost their faith and just wait for the end to come. Whatever that end is.

You are probably wondering why I am using quotation marks in the words ‘government’ and ‘parliament’. Simply because, the country that is considered to have given birth to democracy, is ruled by a coalition government that none of the citizens approved. The role of the parliament in defending the citizens’ rights and interests has ceased to exist. Instead, it seems like the only reason for its existence is to vote for loan bills one after another. No one ever knows what these bills contain. Even those who vote for them have not read the terms of the loans that the bills are called to approve. They just vote them, because this is the party ‘line’ or because they have to, since the troika and the creditors said so. And the very few members of the parliament that dare to vote against them, are expelled from the parliament by their party leader, even though they were elected by the citizens.

Anyway, I am not an economist or a political analyst. These are just my personal thoughts. I even don’t know where the truth lies or what is going to happen. All I know is that the vast majority of middle and lower class people are drained. They have nothing else to give but their dignity. Some of them have given that up too.

And as Billy Joel says ‘We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning’.