For young Greeks, pain in prosperity
Children don’t create the world. They accept it as it is. Depending on what they learn, they become easy or difficult, brilliant or petty criminals, brilliant or indifferent people. Crime was a one-way street for the hooded 11-year-old in the northern city of Thessaloniki. A child born into a family on the fringes of society can rarely escape from that background. Exclusion, poverty and delinquency are so deeply embedded that they become his natural surroundings, where he feels comfortable and secure. Whenever he tries to escape, «democratic» society rejects him and pushes him back to the sidelines. «My brother-in-law’s a policeman, he’ll find a way of collaring him. He’s put him inside before. Get the ‘virus’ out of here and clean up the neighborhood,» said a middle-aged woman in downtown Athens of a 20-year-old man from a poverty-stricken family who is constantly in and out of prison for minor offenses. And so «order» was restored. The outcome of programs that stigmatize young offenders are known to intensify anti-social behavior, while in the prison system they become professional criminals. Lost youths are excluded from respectable society, which does not shape them but forces them to comply. But young people’s problems are inherited from adult society, which instructs them in violence. When a television presenter recently smashed up a brand-new car with a sledgehammer on screen as part of a show, why should we be surprised that an 11-year-old without the safety net of a stable family throws stones and Molotov cocktails? His stones strike at a prosperous society, a society that violates all the values and principles it supposedly stands for, a society that represses its members, demanding full obedience from the victims. Street billboards and television commercials promote the myth of abundance, spreading insecurity among society’s poor. Wealthier people’s false pleasure of overconsumption fills the poor with a sense of deprivation. The endless glorification of money is taking a hefty toll on their self-confidence. At the same time, the masters of abundance only care about their business dealings, turning their backs on those who are excluded from prosperity. Any diversion from the prevailing social value system is easily cast aside. After all, there are disciplinary institutions – houses for the unwanted and the damned. There is no need for prevention when punishment has no problem separating the two faces of society: the glittering, well-ordered elite from the unwashed masses.
