We live in hell

I was watching a program on tv half an hour ago which was about the killing of young Alexis in Greece and the events that occured afterwards. To make the story short for anyone that doesn’t know, in Greece on the 6th of December 15-year-old Alexis was shot twice by the police for no apparent reason and he died as a result of the shooting. On the next day and for every day ever since there were riots on the streets on what initially seemed to be a protest for Alexis’ death. The riots continued by anti-government and student groups who burnt down buildings, broken bussinesses and destroyed public as well as private transport vehicles. It seems that Alexis’ death was just the event that initiated the riots that are against the poverty, the hunger, the corrupt government and democracy that is in place in Greece. What urged me to write this post is not Alexis’ death although I do feel sorry for his family and I do wish for the imprisonment of the people responsible for that death. What actually urged me to write this is the anti-government protests that are taking place in Athens and throughout Greece as well as the rest of the world for what happened and what is happening every day in Greece. What urged me to write this post is the corrupt system and the slow but eventual loss of our freedom of expression under laws that oppress us and under governments that do not help the young people take this world forward.

A professor in the show said this: “Πρέπει τα παιδιά να καταλάβουν ότι δεν υπάρχει παράδεισος. Υπάρχει μόνο η κόλαση. Η κόλαση ομως έχει πολύ περιθώριο για βελτίωση”. – “The children should understand that there is no heaven. There is just hell. But hell has a lot of potential for improvement.” He said this referring to the political and social situation in Greece. But I will take it a step further. Hell exists everywhere. In all of the civilised world there is hell. This hell comes from the attempt to create oppressed people. People with no hope and no dreams. People that only wake up to work come back home and feed their potential party voters. Throughout the world I see governments formed that try to create people who are unimaginative. People that dream for nothing and hope for nothing. People who lose the ability to dream or at least if they can’t do that, they lose the ability to speak out for their dreams.

You see when the people are not hungry, have a home to sleep in, have no enemy to unite them – they stop talking about their dreams. They stop dreaming. When you control the media and the flow of information you control what people see as truth. When there is not a touch of intelligence in what people watch, or a touch of education people feel that if they get that car or that new computer their life would be complete. People buy and buy and buy things that they don’t need. They buy things and they forget to dream. Whatever time they have they use it to buy stuff or they use it to watch tv that forces them to buy stuff that they don’t need and then the economy is working. Then the people make money to buy stuff and what’s happening? Very few people are becoming richer and richer. What goal would someone have after being rich enough to live 20 lifetimes and 20 more? Domination. But how is domination achieved with so many billions of people around? It is achieved by making them think that they still have a choice, when they have none. Making them work more hours because it’s justified and then you have obedient slaves that work just to be slaves.

People have forgotten why they fought for so many years (2 world wars) just to be free. They forgot the essence of freedom. People don’t know what it means to be free unless you live under oppression and hunger. Our parents know and even them they might not even know, but our grandparents certainly do. You see the same with happiness you don’t know how it feels until you’ve felt pain and sadness before hand. A lifetime of happiness is a lifetime dull and boring if you ask me. If you never had to fight about anything in your life and it was all given to you, you never feel as if you have to fight for anything. If everything is taken away from you slowly you don’t even realise it until it’s too late. We are like a frog put in a beaker which is slowly boiled dead. Just like the frog so are we slowly being stripped of all of our rights and freedoms until it’s eventually too late.

I do not support any kind of censorship. I do not even support hate speech censorship. If someone hates someone or a group of people and he/she feels there is a reason to do so he should be freely allowed to express himself. That’s the beauty of democracy. You should be allowed to say anything and believe anything about anyone. It’s the essence to our free will. Yes this means that it will allow racist, homophobic, genocidal messages to be published but it means that it will also allow the human spirit which lies in the freedom of human thought to be expressed. It will also be a good way to see what people think, what their beliefs are and in essence you will be able to explain what you think too and choose your site. Becaues by censoring speech, by recording everyone’s moves with CCTV and cameras placed everywhere you don’t allow people to freely express themselves. Sure you cut down on crime and I believe that’s important too, but you don’t allow the common man/woman to walk and be free and do what he/she thinks is right. You just insert that man/woman into social norms that you consider to be appropriate and to a pattern of actions that you have already preselected for them.

Everyone follows the trend now. No-one decides for themselves. Instead of people trying to be different they are trying to be acknowledged in groups/societies by dressing or acting like the majority of them. Most people do not understand that there is always another choice. In Greece the riots express the desire to be free. It expresses the desire for the young generation to have a future, to have dreams to be able to freely be what they want to be with no control and nothing minimising their efforts and nothing stopping their dreams. You see all we have now was won by the generation of our parents/grandparents who had nothing and in the end managed to get something out of nothing. They are no longer able to see what else they  need because it’s too late. Our generation has the technology, it has the dreams, it has the power to go far… To not stop and say enough in what we all have. We have the ability to change tomorrow yet we sit down like ignorant fools, eating and sleeping going to school, doing our homework, partying late at night and seek  nothing. We don’t feel there is need to change what is already out there. We feel like we are all lacking something but we don’t quite know what it is.

What it is is our lack of dreams. Our lack of exploring our environment and feel like we need to do something to change it. Technological change has been faster than anything but the change in ideals and philosophies behind life hasn’t. There are groups of people that are still fighting for equality that is a given for most of us. There are people dying of diseases and hunger which is just difficult for us to imagine so we just choose to ignore it like it doesn’t exist. Our planet is dying and yet we don’t vote for governments that promise change. If we are the future why don’t more young people get elected in parliament? Just like in the past and now in the future it would be us that will change and will see as important things that the old people don’t. We will fight for our rights, for the right to be free and alive throughout the world. We would be the ones that are going to change the world. But are we going to act? Or are we going to stay home and watch the world collapse from the safety of our couch? At least in certain places in the world there is still some fighting spirit, even though it had to come to a death for them to wake up. I don’t accept death and I don’t accept destruction. But sometimes it’s through destroying through fighting that you are going to get heard, that things are going to change. I feel that even if the whole city is burnt to the ground it would be right if things change. Because things have to change. Sometimes you need to act rather than just sit down and talk.