Mayhem

I decided to write this article-essay-delirium to share my thoughts on the situation that has risen(and by now has been defused) in several cities of Greece. You wouldn't actually call this inspiration...I call it enchantment. I stand enchanted before a moral crisis that seems to be expressed via violence and chaos. I would find it understandable that the cradle of all these actions is the death of our fellow citizen Alexandros Grigoropoulos on the hands of a police officer who is by definition meant to protect every person who befalls in the category of citizens, especially if the fact that he was just a kid was taken into account,. Suspicious by nature, I seriously doubt that the people throwing rocks and handmade bombs share my compassion for the victim's family and my sincere hope that he may rest in peace. So the question remains. Why are those people possessed by Neronic obsessions, willing to burn the city to the ground? Are the driven by the stored anger of a dysfunctional, on all levels, society that just could not take this final blow? And if that is true have we reached the point of hitting bottom, that boiling point which precedes all historical revolutions or is there still more to come and undermine our political, national, moral, economical and so on status? Or, quite in the contrary, are the burned buildings and vehicles the results of mere vandalism, the expression of instinctive human violence- which can actually have deeper causes- that just have to rise in the surface every now and then, in order to be defused? Judging myself as insufficient of answering what seems to me fundamental, I could but use a worn out cliché. Things are rarely black and white. Mostly they are shades of grey and between those shades, one must seek the truth. Undoubtedly, there are those people who under the mask of politics, sports, religion and pretty much any popular human activity satisfy their unquenchable need of invoking chaos and simply breaking stuff. I feel deprived of any right, however, to assume that there are no spirits in this country, that appalled by what can only be described as unthinkable-that being the murder (and by no means manslaughter) of 15 year old boy by some power drunk law enforcer-, feel that the die is cast. That this death is the sign of a rotten and not rotting system and that the means are right for taking. And if that’s the case then we can hope for change.

But who am I to tell? I am a kid as well, a littler older than Alexandros Grigoropoulos, but still a kid. And If I know something is that I can find comfort in the thought that no blood is spilled in vain and that everything happens for a reason. The comfort and solace that his family can never find in betterment.