Skylla og Kharybdis

Av - 16.6.2012 12:38

En mennesketype det ikke er noen grunn til å misunne i disse dager: Den greske velger. Nikos Konstandaras skriver skarpt og bevegende om bakgrunnen for Hellas’ krise og det umulige valget:

At a moment when the choices should be as clear as possible — between reform and stagnation, between Europe and isolation, between painful progress and the deceptive comfort of surrender — the issues are hopelessly confused by false expectations, by false choices and by the total failure of a political class that can’t propose solutions to the country’s problems and can’t forge a minimal national consensus on what is at stake and what needs to be done.

Konstandaras kommer til slutt inn på en av dagens greske gåter — hvorfor har ikke alle grekere løpt ned bankene og reddet det de kunne av sparepengene sine? Ja, mye er tatt ut, men i mai var det ennå 170 milliarder euro igjen, til tross for koret av økonomer som sier at landet vil forlate den felles europeiske valutaen:

Why? Maybe when the volcano rumbles, when the thugs come for our neighbor, when a society gives up the fight for progress, the familiarity of our routines numbs us to the dust and roar of the coming stampede. Maybe we do not think bad things will happen to us. Maybe that’s what the people of Constantinople felt before it fell to the Ottomans in 1453, or the Greeks who were swept out of Asia Minor in 1922, or the innocents sucked into the civil war of 1946-49. What I want to remember from Greece in 2012 is how laziness and years of intellectual sloppiness can waste the gift of freedom and leave open the gates of the city — how we allowed our leaders to pander to us until we had no one capable of leading us, no one next to us at the barricades.

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