Nostalgia for events unlived
As a millennial, I learned about the Athens Polytechnic Uprising in a rather quiet manner, through books and from two or three trusted people who were there. I read poems about it and listened to songs; I went to events that had an emotional impact. Whenever I pass Stournari Street, I think of something related to that event, like lighting a small candle in my mind against oppression and incongruity.
Like in other countries in Europe’s South, the dictatorship is not some distant event. It doesn’t feel that way to me. Our rights are in jeopardy all the time. Torture has been banned but it hasn’t disappeared. Freedom of speech and the media, and protection of privacy are the first to go when the occasion arises. Fascism sneaks its way onto our trains, harasses hard-working migrants and makes culprits out of people trying to survive with nothing. Cheap patriotism is peddled in the form of fear. There are those who like the idea of an insular, frightened Greece. Education, across Europe, is an uneven gauntlet, a parade of privileges. Police brutality rains down on the marginalized and many citizens in the most well-educated part of the world seem fed up with democracy.
If only the chants of November 17 were a thing of the past.
Our freedom, inside us, has been broken. So many people go around living a life that doesn’t even seem like their own. We need the air of a time when it seemed possible to take control of our destiny and overthrow whatever curbed our freedom. We act as though we’re numb, curled into a ball in a corner of time, ready to be crushed by the passage of history.
I envy the people who believed they could accomplish something with collective action, who wanted to band together instead of spread asunder. I feel a sense of nostalgia for something I never knew: being a dreamer without petty expediencies. Our generation became complacent by assuming frustrations and sadnesses that were not ours to begin with. It spoke a language that wasn’t its own, assumed a tired style that was passed down by others (this is now changing) and thus delayed in rising up against the things oppressing us in the here and now, delayed finding its own battles. The game was lost at the whistle. But it is never too late.
Vivian Stergiou is a writer.
