Over the past few years I have been posting occasional news, reports and updates about the situation in Greece. Not that Greece is any more (or less) important than any other corner of the world, but it just happens to be the corner of the world I come from. A lot of times I will post about strikes, fascist and racist attacks, unemployment figures, police brutality and torture, but also about community responses to the crisis, examples of resistance and mutual aid, people organizing in the face of hopelessness. And some times I will post about “little stories,” about the lives, and sometimes deaths, of regular people. Because all too often when we get to watch or read the news, they are about the “big news” such as major government crackdowns, plane crashes, submarine explosions, government surveillance, crises, disasters, etc., items that have been deemed by someone in an editorial room to be “newsworthy.” Yet in the midst, or the shadows, of all the “big news” there are always ordinary people, not much different than you and me, who are confronted with limited choices in apparently overwhelming circumstances and who make decisions that might seem the best at the moment but are almost always tragic.
In today’s news from Greece: A 19-year old is caught without a ticket on a trolley bus and in order to escape paying the fine he jumps out of the moving vehicle, hits his head on the fall and dies hours later. A 20-year-old mother and a 44-year-old grandmother are arrested after the body of the two-day-old infant of the mother was found dead in a local landfill. Two men are found dead near Iraklio Crete, one hanged, the other shot, both apparent, and unrelated, suicides.
It isn’t that these stories and lives matter more than the stories and lives out of Egypt, India, Alabama, Los Angeles, etc. It is just that these stories and lives matter. Because we should never forget that behind the “news” are people, most of whom often want nothing more than to live an ordinary, happy, quiet life.