Grim outlook
The frustratingly grim, if not depressing, domestic and global prospects threaten to undermine, if not shatter, the message of the resurrection that men will emerge from the dark and the shadow of death. The global hegemony of a sole superpower has resulted in a unique cultural situation in which the periphery is consuming, in an uncritical and self-destructive fashion, even the most base products of an arrogant metropolis. In the Holy Land itself, death is establishing its own kingdom on Earth. It is doing so with the help of injustice and the hypocrisy of a paralyzed international community which is witnessing its much-touted and universally recognized organizations being scorned by an army that is supposedly fighting terrorism but which is, in fact, producing and perpetuating terror. And perhaps this is the most manifest and disheartening sign that humanity, notwithstanding its will (or claims to will) to use its best-established mechanisms in order to fight the existing injustice that divides the world into a small minority of haves, on the one hand, and millions of impoverished and unfree individuals on the other, is still far from adopting those measures which could bring about the desired outcome. The lack of political backbone and the absence of concern over the fate of all sorts of suffering people prepares the ground for the growth of those dark advocates of intolerance, hatred, and crude populism. The fireworks that illuminated the triumphant arrival of the new millennium have long been extinguished; so has the ungrounded – as it soon proved – enthusiasm which accompanied its welcome. Inside the country, the government has come to a halt under the burden of fierce internal dissent which threatens to bring the entire public sphere to stagnation. Economic indices, the last resort of those who refuse to see the genuine picture behind the prosperous numbers, are grim too. Greece might no longer be a small country but the image of a powerful Greece resides only in the imaginative rhetoric of the ruling class. In truth, hard as this truth may be, we still cannot give a definite answer (meaning an optimistic one) to Angelos Sikelianos’s question: «Is it dawning, comrades, ahead of us or is night falling?»
