Feeling like a dog chasing his own tail in a country and a society out of control

From time to time a break from the news and the posting is highly necessary to avoid what I call “my mental collapse” and escape the suffocating and frustrating feeling I get that I’m a dog trapped in a cage, chasing his own tail.

This feeling has little to do with my personal life but rather with the situation in the country, the politics, the economy and the horrific impact to the society.

I have sadly realized in the last one, one and a half years that we’re in a roll caster on the downward at high speed.

Officially and on the papers, Greece is doing fine in terms on economy.

Unofficially, except when the Eurostat comes out with its statistics, and in reality, Greeks struggle each and every month to make ends meet due to the high prices in food and other essential items, housing, health care, utilities and services.

The people suffer from a strong feeling of insecurity as they don’t know where the next day, the next month or year will take them to, if they’ll have their work, their home, their whole existence intact.

At the same time, they see politicians and other state officials involved in scandals to go around easy and free and unbothered, they hear of news that an X number of people have been arrested for the OPEKEPE scandal, for example, a few days later they hear the majority of the arrested have been set free… nobody really can have a clue of what is going on.

Livestock farmers have been hearing of compensations for the loss of thousands of sheep and goats due to the sheep smallpox, coming in the “next few days” and they hear them coming but never arriving.

These are the two crash examples from the Greek reality since last April. Things are moving but they are still standing on the same spot.

As for the government measures to lower prices in 2,000 supermarkets items, it turned out that the price reductions affected not essential things such as milk, cheese, baby formula, meat and poultry etc but clothespins, charcoal tablets and breaded crab claws, just to mention a few.

Such highly important issues for the society are simply ignored by the government that prefers to display determination in practically non-existing issues as to who is in charge for  the cleaning and maintenance of the Monument of the Unknown Soldier in front of the Parliament and whether protests should be further allowed. Premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis showed clearly who is the anything but a democratic ruler of the country and in zero time passed a bill that the Defense Ministry should be in charge and no protests or demonstrations should be allowed.  The unessential express legislation came after Panos Rouci, the father of one of 57 Tempi train crash victims, ended his hunger strike there.

Did this legislation solve any of the Greeks’ daily problems? Of course, it did not. But it changed for a while the public agenda with an army of government-affiliated journalists and trolls on internet creating a “national issue” where there was none.

This was followed by the funeral on public expenses of songwriter and singer Dionissis Savvopoulos, 81, a “revolutionary” in his young years and a New Democracy supporter in the last 30 years. The whole government attended the funeral and their journos’ supporters attacked anyone else thus primarily the left-wing opposition for not paying the due respect incl. attending the funeral.

Now what? Have they gone so far to dictate who has to mourn for whom and at what level? That’s much more than dictatorship, that’s beyond.

And what does the society do to overcome their growing frustration? They drive like crazy killing themselves or others on the roads, disobey every rule, shout and curse, they are aggressive at anyone they think he’s looking at them ‘strangely’, they pull a knife out to solve a dispute, violence among their children in schools and outside them is longer out of control, and minors get poisoned by alcohol consumption or die like a 17-year-old girl last weekend.

So, I’m maybe in a privileged situation to chase my own tail and not go out on the streets shouting and coursing at everyone I see, like some weird old ladies we used to see when we’re kids.

But hey! Thank goodness, we have government ministers like the one in the Health Ministry calling us “miserables” blaming us of course for the misery the government has brought us to. Go figure!