An Insignificant Gesture of Sad Memory

My mother died on a Sunday, 22nd March, at around 11:30 a.m. My 11 year old son was at home at the time, he was sleeping when we left to go to the hospital to see his grandmother.

My mother had suffered a stroke; she fell asleep and never woke up. That Sunday morning was her last - in this world at least.

I am not quite sure what happened when it happened, how things were taken care of, who dealt with paper work and how. I remember a doctor giving me a certificate, and then we were home.

My son, awake, came to the door, holding a small ball -- obviously he had been playing around.

I tried to put it in a roundabout way. My son would not accept what happened until he heard spelled out clearly.
Grandmother is dead.

He started crying, then all of a sudden he threw down the ball and went to the phone crying "I don't believe it".

He picked up the phone and rang his grandmother, as he always did.

Nobody answered.


This insignificantly small gesture, a desperate attempt to negate reality, has remained a vivid memory. An eleven year old yearning for some magic to make the nightmare go away.

The Greece Conundrum - Or Why Is It A Country Consciously Builds Its Desctruction -- In Two Sentences

A little over one month ago, after a bogus referendum (see below) on a non-existent issue, The  Telegraph published a monumentally titled and subtitled article:

"Greece has been taken hostage by a government disguising its incompetence as heroism

Desperate suffering awaits a people who have chosen easy lies over uncomfortable truths"

 

This says it all!

Greece's present government has, in 7 months of mind numbing posturing, idiotic experimentation, and debilitating mismanagement (and some nepotism), plunged Greece into abysmal depths of recession never before seen with such rapidity since the country's modern inception in the early 19th century. So much so, that previous Greek governments -- amongst the world's most inefficient, corrupt, and savagely self-serving -- seem not so bad after all! 

Greece has gone from: 

- a slight positive balance of payments to capital flight (83 B euro) and capital controls

- a mediocre educational system -- despite a high teacher - to - student ratio (13:1) -- to a worse educational system, by design. The education minister of Greece announced that excellence in education is a malady.

- having four relatively capitalized banks operating with chances of surviving the storm - to a banking system reduced to nothingness in one week of stock exchange operation;

- the collapse of the Athens Stock exchange

- a recession-driving new bail-out agreement

...while back at the ranch, the government and its cronies are fighting over what is the comrade-correct thing to do: sleep with the beard under the sheet or over?

If there ever has been a case of mass debilitation, this is it.

And it is contained elegantly and in sufficiency within those two lines.

I think that Greeks do not believe they deserve what they have. So they destroy it to reach the lower level of what they think they justly deserve.

It's a pity.

If they opened their eyes they may have seen that reality is unconscionably brutal about itself: it is, without shades, of grey or otherwise.

If Greeks opened their eyes they may have noticed, or some of them at least, that deserve does not come into the equation: you have what you have, and when you have it you can lose it just as well.

You cannot lose what you do not have and pride is just as much part of it as anything else.

A view from inside a pool at the top of the rock at Kaladi, isle of Kythera, Greece.

Whatever Greeks do or, more likely, choose to NOT do, they should read this short article. Better still, reading being a strain to the eye, someone should read it to them over national television and radio...