Hardly anyone, perhaps nobody, got what they wanted in Greece in last weekend’s national elections.
Only a brain-dead bacteria who has spent more than a few year’s in Greece could imagine that anyone really “wants” the new government and its politicians in power.
Greeks voted against the previous New Democracy government in large part because of the total lack of action at a time of nation-wide enthusiasm for change and improvement, a touch of honesty in a dishonest country. Kostas Karamanlis and his party failed more miserably than any failure in the past century to do anything, to lift a finger, to even twitch, towards the changes in a rotten state which they had been given a mandate for by a small majority of voters.
They had a chance those few years ago to erase some of the granite mountains, the marble walls of insane bureaucracy that prevent most progress, enterprise and signs of real life in a corrupt, nepotistic society. They acted not at all. They acted as if men of marble, or like frightened feeble creatures. They inspired not one bit, they disappointed very much. They showed courage and leadership, not at all.
Greeks live in a self-delusion that the one or two cousins in each extended family who are given favours by the party or candidate they vote into power makes up for the brutally incompetent, rude and ignorant majority of public sector employees who impoverish their daily lives, monetarily, spiritually and emotionally. A vastly inflated number are employed by the public sector, paid for out of the pockets of those who actually work and pay taxes. A number which should be swiftly cut in half (or more).
The country has close to no sense of enterprise en mass. The young are generally taught that any type of success is ill-gotten and not earned by effort, intelligence, use of imagination, courage, or effort – something also believed by far too large a number of adults.
The only way the country will rise above being a huge disappointment (occasionally diluted by a huge dollop of misplaced national pride) to all, is when Greeks decide to “own” their country again. To refuse to suffer the indignities and pathetic incompetence of their civil servants, to throw rotten tomatoes at the corrupt officials and members of parliament, to refuse to vote for a candidate just because he promises to pave the road up to their house, or promises to place their son in a public sector job with lifetime tenure (but surprise, surprise, a lifetime of wasteful pointlessness is the unseen freebie that goes as part and parcel of public sector employment in Greece). It will rise when an ingredient of being a successful politician is at least, the perception of being honest and forthright (currently no-one but a fool considers any politician in Greece to be honest until proven other than bent and gnarled by perverse dishonesty).
Time to wake up? There is always a new day, always a chance for better, brighter futures….perhaps you owe it to your children whom you claim to love so much, what about their futures?
Awake from your rotten, stale sleep and pave the way for the sweetest of dreams….a new and better reality.
