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.
Euro and memorandum-permitting, I will be turning forty this year. I think of those who were born forty years before me. Someone born in 1932 would have time to live whether directly or by reflection, until his own forties, a dictatorship, a war, an occupation, a civil war, a post-civil war state with all the mess that came with it, and a dictatorship once again. Shall we take the forty-year old person before them, born in 1892? Talk of their historical plate being full. But poor us, what did we experience historically from the moment we can remember ourselves? No-thing. Obviously, much happened in all those years, but how can they possibly compare in their dramatic nature compared to the past? 1989 saw some earth-shattering changes, but neither our world nor our history didn’t radically change. Our own world, being in the winners’ camp, continued to flow uninterrupted for another twenty years. Wasn’t it about time for an end to the boredom, wasn’t it time for us to take our shot of History, wasn’t it about time for us to taste its sweetness?
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.
They hold you and they lead you straight to the cliff; you can see it, so many around you have fallen off it already, you see that, yet that’s what you’ve learned, to be led, that’s what you’ve learned, to leave these matters to those who know better; at least at the time when they push you over you find solace in knowing you did nothing wrong, that you caused no indiscipline with your actions, that you may have fallen, but you fell as a good child, you fell following the path of sensibility, knowing that there was no other path than that one. Between the panic of finding yourself emancipated just before the cliff and trying to escape on your own, you prefer the hand pushing you confidently over it, and the mouth that at that moment whispers in your eary that any other option would be disastrous, that anything it does, it does it for your own good and the wider good of the country an your children; your children which, by the time they turn forty are most likely to have faced much more History than you ever did.
