Wasting words
Words are a society’s last resource. Even when everything else is lost, words are there to connect people; words are needed to find solutions, to describe problems and make plans to emerge from every crisis. In Greece, this land of of endless contentiousness, words have been used up sooner than the paltry remnants of the public coffers. The law, for example, has become the resort of workers, farmers and anyone else with a complaint. The fact that we have not yet been able to agree that «laws are passed by Parliament and no one can break them with impunity» resulted in the events of December, under the slogan «Law equals terror.» The fact that illegality has begun to be examined in the light (according to those who break the law) of incentives has allowed certain youths to believe it is their right to set fire to trains because they don’t like the faces of the people riding them. When one generation carelessly exhausts the concept of legality in political demonstrations, they shouldn’t be surprised when the next generation throws stones at police stations. When burning banks is not seen as such a crime «because they rob us with high interest rates,» the next step is smashing the stores of the greengrocers because they «cheat on the scales.» When throwing yogurt at professors is seen as a «symbolic protest,» beating them will be a «revolutionary act.» When the «asylum for ideas» means that legality cannot be imposed on university campuses, then thugs will always find asylum. Unfortunately, there are thousands of kids out there who have not been taught to distinguish between concepts, to respect words. We have wasted words and allowed a generation to drown in the postmodern nebula that can be used to justify almost anything, even the «destruction of the symbols of power,» that is, the murder of 21-year-olds in uniform.
