I have no country. I am trying to understand if I ever had one and if I will ever have one.
I never understood the meaning of a country, not even as a kid. I could understand what it means to have common traits with other people, things like a common language, a common religion, common customs or even racial characteristics. This is just something that happens, without being good or bad. So, I was greek, my parents were both coming from immigrant families of greek origin, who used to live in Northern and West Turkey, known as Pontiacs and Asia Minors. Three of my grandparents would speak a different greek dialect, which I could understand, they were all christian orthodox, but there were differences in their customs, in minor things. My maternal grandmother would cook food from Pontus, but she would make pies using recipes and knit using patterns from the Vlachs, another greek tribe, because, as she used to say, the Vlach women had somekind of expertise in that field. Needless to say, they had their own dialect.
The area where I grew up, was a melting pot of many different greek "tribes". The locals were using a slavic dialect, imposed to them some decades before my ancestors moved there. Pontiacs, Asia Minors, Thracians, Vlachs and others, all had their small, but significant to them, differences from the rest of the groups. But, somehow, they would all get along perfectly. Many years later, when I asked my mother about her father's experiences of living in Turkey - he came to Greece when he was 22-23 years old, she told me, he had many friends there, Turkish, Greek Muslims, Greeks, even Christian Turks and Armenians. Before all the wars had started, they would all get along. Because they were all People. Humans. Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Growing up, I understood - partly because of my family, my education, but basically because of my travelling all over the world, the importance of accepting and more significantly respecting people who are different from me. I was taught, that despite being a christian, I have to take off my shoes to enter a mosque, respecting the fact that this is a holy place to someone else, exactly the same way I would like a foreign visitor to respect my customs, like not entering the sacred part of the temple. I have been to Muslim - Shia, Sunni, Sufi, Ahmadiyya, Christian - almost every possible kind - I even had communion in a catholic church once (they told me I'm going to hell for doing that), bahai, I was blessed and offered flowers in Hindu temples, I burned sticks in buddhist temples, I prayed in Shinto temples, purifying myself with water and clapping my hands in silence, I was blessed by the living godess in Nepal, I was given charms to avoid black magic, I saw shamans performing rituals with black candles in a catholic church in Guatemala and so on...
What I understood od all that, was that we are all exactly the same. There is absolutely no difference at all. All the people I have met have exactly the same basic needs,
- to eat (yes or no to pigs, cows, frogs, cockroaches, beatles, cats, dogs, doves even rocks/soil and human flesh in extreme cases)
- to have a housing that protects them and where they gather up (villas, penthouse flats, dorms, mansons, sailing boats, huts, igloos, houses made of mud, rock, wood, hay, leaves, cow shit, in a paper box on the street, houses that are destroyed in the summer and built again after the rain season... with pets or even cattle inside their house, snakes for good luck etc.)
- to communicate with their peers (human or not)
- to explain what they don't understand or are afraid of (religion or philosophy)
and so on.
So, small groups of people, depending on the point of integration they had to other groups have more or less of all these things in common. But, what is a country??
According to holy wikipedia,
a country is a geographical region. Ok. But what determines this region? What makes some people lucky or unlucky to be born in the right or the wrong place? Since the countries don't signify the territorial presence of a homogenous group of people, then what are they good for? If it's for history, then... in my case... my ancestors' history traces (theoretically) back to ancient greece, but later on, at some point in history, they moved to today's Turkey, so shouldn't I be taught turkish history as well? And today? My country is part of the EU, but my knowledge over Finnish or Croatian history is limited to really basic information, most of which i have looked it up myself. So, I'm learning the history of the different kingdoms that ruled most of the geographical area, I guess, where i currently live. So, now, that I'm looking for a job in Abu Dhabi, I'm doomed.
I hear on the news, my country is in a major financial crisis. Yeah, right. They mean my country is bankrupt, that my country has no money to pay what it has to. So, my geographical area is in debt. Hmm... Weird, isn't it? I'm just trying to understand. Can a geographical area owe money? My poor, ignorant mind says no. People owe money. So, who are those people? Me? My parents? My friends? Which one of them? And whom do we owe it to? My friend, Katerina, lives in London now. She works there and pays taxes there. She is still having a greek passport though. So, if the UK gave money to greece... would she owe money to herself? And me? I applied for a job in Brussels. Will i also owe money to myself soon?
So... it can't be just a geographical territory. If it was, then I would have a country. According to holy wiki, again, it has to be a
sovereign state (UK is a big story). Ok. Then... is Greece, my geographical country, a sovereign state, then?
Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. (wiki again) But, as I was taught, the EU treaties and legal acts are supreme to my country's constitution and laws. Currently, since the IMF story started, I hear on TV that the country loses its soverignty. I have not studied law, international economy, history or international relations and I know no more that what most people do. I am only trying to understand if i am a "free" citizen of a "free" "country". I try to understand what it means when I see people out in the streets, demonstrating for the last two years, shouting, burning and destroying (I don't agree to that, but it happens), peacefully gathering, sending letters to politicians, blogging, making all kinds of Facebook groups to express their opinion and the result is that they are just being ignored.
I recently heard on TV - and who knows what this means nowdays, but whatever- that after borrowing all this money and going through all this, the result will HOPEFULLY be, that after the debt "cut", in 2020 my "country" will owe as much money as it did before it all started. They said that the point in all this is that the rate with which our debt will be rising will be slightly smaller than it used to be. But it will still be rising.
When I was sixteen, I went to the EU parliament in Strasburg. We had to work on some subjects back then and make groups and discuss about them. Two of them was the monetary and fiscal policy of the EU and the other was expanding the EU. As I kid, I had to study and find arguements about these things. How expanding the EU territory offers a bigger market, able to be competitive to the US, Russia and the then rising China, India and Latin America Markets. How the differences between the EU ethnic groups - plus the ones that would be later added- would make it difficult to have a homogenous federal country/ state/ organization/ whatever you want to call it, since in the case of the US it helped that they were all immigrants, while here they are not. How we should work - as Europe- into achieving a basic form of integration, so that it gets easier over the time. People studying and working all around, everyone has to learn english and french or german at school, otherwise is considered to be illiterate, (and i have to say that they greeks don't speak or write greek very well) etc. And when the EU constitution effort, well, failed, I guess it meant that not everybody agreed to this integrated idea. I was sorry to hear this, but that's just my own feeling about it.
So, today, with all the things that happenned, I have this weird feeling, a sixth sense thing, that there were new ways discovered to avoid this problem. Since not everybody agrees, there seems to be a little experiment going on. The tests are done on a very EU-friendly country, a small one, that suddenly seems to be threatened by huge problems and ta-da... new tools, like the EFSF or others have the ability to ignore people or governments and this is not just for my tiny "country", but for all the euro-zone countries (decided by the 27 EU members though and not just the euro-zone ones).
I don't care about this. I don't mind. I am not one of those well-educated citizens that know what things should be like and no, I don't have a better suggestion to make. But, please, don't accuse me of that. I am an engineer. It's not my job to know about monetary policies and government systems. If it was, I think I would at least have a more solid opinion to state. I am just a naive citizen, my major problems have to do with being financially independent from my parents, finding my dream boyfriend and achieving the ideal blond hair color. What I don't like though, is being lied to. I don't like feeling that someone plays tricks on me and laughs behind my back. Everybody outide of Greece says that people who live here are lazy and they don't see that all of my friends had to leave the country to work - as immigrants- to ideal jobs where they are not considered to be lazy anymore, but have to deal with racism because of being greek.
I don't care if greece is a country any more. I don't care if it ever was. I don't care if my prime minister is jewish or american or a freemason or whatever. It doens't matter to me. At all. He is free to be whoever he wants to be, but so should I. It hurts when I hear that they called the president of democracy a traιtor and he answered almost in tears that he fought in a battlefield for this country. It hurts more when I realize that I don't know if he is right or wrong. I don't know what to believe any more.
I don't need a country. It might have been a nice thing to have, but since I can't have one, it's ok, for the moment. I only need to know my obligations, my rights, the truth and the freedom to choose. But please, at least give me that. If I was born a slave, if my caste is of the lower kind, please let me know. I was trained to accept my destiny for decades now, so there is no need to worry. But don't tell me that I'm free, when I'm not. I 've learned life isn't fair and I can live with this. But when I feel that Ι'm being wronged, then I have no idea what I might become.
