Let’s imagine ourselves in the future. Let’s say in twenty years. Perhaps we do not know whether the most ominous scenarios of the state of the world will be confirmed, or whether there will be a current that will push global becoming in a more positive direction. The second seems unlikely. Of course, though, those of us still here will be constantly displaying digital souvenirs of our lives and periodizing our past, distinguishing its good periods from its bad.
I honestly wonder if there is anyone among that soulful 41% who last year awarded the Govt. Mitsotakis even if he wasn’t at the ballot box in the European Union elections a year later, who paused to reflect on how he would remember this present in the future.
We know that no moral position can explain this consent vote – only temporary financial gain. Trapped in the eternal ‘now’, those who supported the deprivation of a country in exchange for a piece of flesh that quickly turns out to be meager and unable to meet any need, chose to ignore time, which is inexorable and irreversible.
After all, everything seems false and fleeting in the moment it happens; only later, when it becomes history or memories, does it make its true and permanent imprint on our lives. You don’t have to go back far to see this: how dark is the memory of the modernization euphoria today? And how comforting were minority cultures that resisted violent transformation?
The same applies to recent memories. Let’s think, for example, how many good elements of our lives we have lost between 2019 and today, and we will understand what happened that summer. Greek society has quietly decided after a decade of decay that it wants to shed the last semblance of sociability and indulge in the most unrestrained and competitive passion the human mind can imagine.
In this arena, everything has begun to merge for the profit that they can produce. We have lost homes, neighborhoods, cities, beaches, islands, mountains, summer itself, the relaxed manners that accompanied fun, the ability to travel. In their place were alienating consumption without any character, hotel cities, images of the disappearance of our favorite places, the never-ending bill in our daily lives from the supermarket to the electricity bill, the constant worry that someone is always ready to pull the rug from under our feet, combined with a suffocating the feeling that we are trapped by what we live and there is no way to escape.
If those who do not care or, even worse, silently accept what is happening, close their eyes and imagine themselves twenty years from now, the image will surely shock them. They will probably be buried in concrete in some nightmare apartment, far from where their communities once breathed.
And suffering from the suffocating heat, they will remember what we are going through as a dark period of their lives in which they gave everything only to receive their self-destruction in return.