Alleged Amarynthos rapists are products of our own creation
The events of the past week in Amarynthos are not isolated occurrences that appeared out of the blue. It is a reality that reflects, like a section of a mirror, our darkest, most sinister side. It is our cynical self that cares only for Number One, the selfish Greek of today who is always right and whose rights come before those of others. It is the parents who encourage their children to prevail at the expense of others, at all costs. Overburdened as we are by a lifestyle that has to fit everything in – work, home, children, social life, keeping up with the Joneses – we do not realize how dramatically we have changed. We do not realize how we are being brainwashed by television serials and the shallowness of our daily lives, the competitiveness and search for comfort zones in every area. We are far more tolerant, almost as if living a second childhood, with fewer scruples. We no longer do as our parents did, we no longer protect our children from the challenges and risks of an open society. We let them grow up in an adult world, absorbing an undigested mass of violence, barbarity, contrasts, hypocrisy, and the social world of adults, unfiltered by experience. Today’s children have glorified rapacity, vulgarity, a lack of dependability and above all violence. They are passive receptacles of information dominated by the illogical, the dramatic, the divergent, the catastrophic. They have difficulty in forming a simple, true image of events. And when – since they are children – they feel the need for cohesion and coexistence that are so necessary at a young age, they find it in the wrong places, for example at the grim spectacle of three girls watching four boys rape a schoolgirl. The teenagers of Amarynthos, blase and with a victorious smile on their lips and the security of the unpunished, are not unusual. They are the children next door. They are the children that we have created to want everything, without limits.
