Translation of a text published by the blogger “old boy” — Greek original here. The text was also published in Unfollow, a new, independently-run magazine in the country.

When you grow up outside dramatic History, you become addicted to a way of thought that makes you think that the plot will continue like that until the end of your life. What is equally, if not more shocking than a world that collapses, is the entirely unexpected element of its collapse. Previous generations knew that anything can turn upside down at any moment, that everything is hanging by a thread. To us, everything looked firmly grounded in unchallengeable bases and away from fear. There was always, of course, the fear of your personal collapse, but any collective collapse at peacetime seemed inconceivable.

Yet the most basic addiction is another one: you become addicted to the conviction that History before the crisis was unfolding in your absence, and likewise it unfolds in your absence within the crisis; you become addicted to the conviction that you are too small and too unimportant to intervene and to attempt to affect it. It is much more consistent according to the up to this point inactive role of yours and it is much easier, psychologically, for you to play the role of the carcass. You prefer to be slaughtered rather than risking for you to slaughter. Such a risk scandalises and untunes you more than anything. And so, even if you realise by this point that much more than what has already been lost is about to be lost,  the defense you’ve been playing is less of some extreme hope for the off-chance to savor the game, and more of a defense of a freeze in the face of the fear of taking your fate into your own hands and to turn yourself from a dominated into someone with a free will. For all these years – and how could you stop now?- you’ve been a small child allowing the grown-ups to take care of the grown-ups’ affairs. You would play with your private games and you would leave the fate of the public life to the grown-ups. Your tiny hands would feel safe when held by the palm of the responsible politicians and the media forces of this land.