A cry from the heart
The words of the 94-year-old woman are shocking. “I have known war, occupation, my country dismembered by Italians and Bulgarians, the deceit of ‘allies,’” she writes. “The dangers that our country faces today are the same or worse,” she adds. “I wish – a thousand times I wish it – that I had died before I saw the boundless carelessness of the Greek political class, which today, with great war cries, is consumed by the need to ‘strain out the gnat’ after having ‘swallowed the camel’ of the international phenomenon of surveillance.” Referring to “our petty political ambitions,” she concludes with a message to the politicians: “They act as if tomorrow it is not they who will have to command the same ship of our sorry homeland.”
This is from a letter by Athina Cacouri, published in Kathimerini’s Greek edition on Thursday (01/09/22). One does not need to know that she is a distinguished author who, in many books, has written about significant people and events in Greek history, to grasp the weight of her words. It is enough that here is a person who has experienced so much, who understood, who absorbed so many ideas and incidents, warning that today’s dangers are “the same or worse” as those that plagued the country during her long life. What else do we need to understand that a nation’s survival is not a given, that citizens and politicians are obliged to always evaluate the situation clearly, to develop their collective strength, to adapt as a nation.
Instead of gravitas and cool heads, instead of learning from the good and bad in our past, we are constantly on the lookout to accuse and undermine each other, to render ourselves useless. Of course, no one can claim that the surveillance of political opponents, journalists and others is not a grave issue which demands examination, the correct handling and accountability. But to abandon the rudder and the oars as we drift into the storm so that we can gouge each other’s eyes out shows either boundless stupidity or unwarranted optimism, a fatal carelessness. And when a politician who blithely drove the country onto the rocks of bankruptcy, and has stayed silent since, rises to lecture the government on how the surveillance issue must be handled, we can only pity our children. Because, when we leave, we bequeath them a legacy of self-destructive behavior in the midst of danger.
