IT’S A small village, where most people work very hard, but they are now asking: “What is the point of working, when life is unliveable? Working for whom?”
As they face an impossible financial future, villagers are openly discussing civil disobedience, and local transport is being organised to bring them into town for today’s huge protest. Such a show of negativity and refusal is unprecedented.
We have a village of refuseniks. The schoolchildren, aware of the receding possibility of a viable life at home, are making banners for use at the protest. This school year they have, for the most part, spent fewer days in class than days when schools are closed due to strikes.
One asks me: “Why to live?” Life is elsewhere, and all of the few teenagers express the intention of emigrating as soon as possible. Today has been their first opportunity – and a dispiriting one, at that – to show how much they have been, and will be, affected by the crisis.
Tension has led to a sense of impotence and unprecedented rage and the situation is frightening, like nothing I have ever experienced in the village, because of the uncertainty as to which way it will go. Village debate, up to now, has been heated in typical Greek fashion, but good-natured and under control. Now it has become violent in thought if not in action. There is no point in blaming either the government – Pasok, which they say “is no longer a socialist party” – or the previous government of New Democracy, which largely presided over the origins of the crisis. Now, they are cursing the whole system, because they know this crisis is not going to pass by the village.
Brussels and the summit leaders agonise over the euro, but the villagers care instead about their own ability to survive.