Being on the road for so long with a routine established gives you the opportunity to think a lot about a lot (provided the kids sleep, as mentioned earlier). Also about topics that have been in ‘snooze’ for a while, because the kids and everything around them always get priority.
So when I heard a couple of comments from foreigners on the ‘Greeks’ and ‘the Greek way’, and ‘you can expect these things from Greeks’, my patriotic antennas emerged and the thought process of a ‘snoozed’ topic began.
My default attitude is to not engage into discussions anymore about the financial situation of the country. Experience shows that I waste saliva and time; most co-speakers have an opinion already and are pretty aggressive about it, so why bother? This is my chance to make an exception and do mention a couple of things, because among other reasons, there is no co-speaker.
This post is about the silly comments and the very funny ‘jokes’ you hear often about a whole nation that found itself f*cked for the generations yet to come, almost overnight. About the people my age that are unemployed for years, hide degrees from their CV to make it possible to get hired as waiters, people that want kids but don’t have the means to raise them and a lot more. Like people who get diagnosed with cancer but do not have money to investigate further, tens of small businesses that go bankrupt daily, kids that go to school and faint from hunger, old ladies that can barely stand but still take care of the hundreds of refugees that arrive in their islands every day.
The businesses that operate like Lichnos do exist, in Greece but also abroad – you did not fall from the sky, did you? There is people in Greece that indeed evade taxes for their entire life and (again I hope you won’t fall from the sky) these are usually not next door people. They are the ones with a lot at stake if they report all millions they have, public profiles, people with high end jobs. To mention more of the cliches: the Greek public sector was undisputably inflated and to a high extent malfunctioning. There were pension schemes that were outrageous. Yes, yes and yes. But I hope that after ten years of this ever-lasting European crisis, people with some sort of knowledge on the topic would agree that it all exploded in Greece for reasons completely different to what I mentioned above.
So let’s say that when you meet a Greek and decide to unfold all your great humour by mentioning that you ‘pay for his/her holidays’ (really? Funny, I thought I worked quite hard for my earnings, I didn’t know it was you personally paying my salary), or that he/she still ‘owes’ you, or you ask him in his face if he is paying his taxes, two things happen:
1. You do not come across as very intelligent. Let alone funny.
2. You put him in a defense position, and hold him personally accountable for what you think every one of the ten million Greeks do. This is very aggressive behaviour, to say the least.
How would you feel if someone comes to you and calls you thief, lier and lazy? I guess it would not be very nice. And if you react somehow, the argument goes that it is not because of you personally, but because of these ‘other Greeks’. Who do you mean, really?
I recall Aggeliki once mentioned that the aggressiveness and rudeness of these comments are comparable to someone going to a Romanian girl and saying: ‘Are you a prostitute? Because we have a lot of Romanian prostitutes in Greece.’ I think we will all agree that you need to have a social handicap to ever consider talking like this to a Romanian. Even if your poor brain has made the problematic connection: ‘lots of Romanian prostitutes in Greece = every Romanian walking in this world is a prostitute’. So why do you think it is acceptable to tell me you will not give me my change back when paying, because you ‘pay for me anyway, and I owe you, not the other way around’? True story, happened in Thalys, when I was paying my coffee years ago. I can be very ready-to-respond usually, but this was a new level of aggression that left me utterly speechless.
By now we, the Greeks abroad, have been immunned to these comments. Sometimes we gather and talk about the ‘best of’, it can be funny. I developed the ‘I don’t waste my saliva’ attitude and I am way happier. But next time you think of being funny on the topic, think twice. Or even better, sit, read and learn; this can truly make a difference.