Greek club...

My wife says that the Germans are "moose-go-fee" (μουσκοφοί). It is a funny term that describes someone who is always smiling and friendly but has a hidden agenda. She also says that when they reveal themselves-"agnandia"-they are already aiming a gun at you. She also says that she is not surprized by Merkel, "all she wants is to turn us into soap", but by our own politicians who are standing by idle. My dear wife describes the sentiment of many people here in Greece. She is a simple person, like me, but a wise person who usual guesses these kinds of things correctly. Judging by publications in the German press and by the stranglehold on our lawmakers she is right on both occasions. The Germans spent crazy sums in the south of europe. Now it holds the south hostage to its every whim. The fact that Germany and its leader Merkel have the power to cancel budgets, topple governments, force legislation and stop democracy in her tracks is something very depressing to us in the south. Those that lived through the German occupation of WW2 are preparing to starve. You can see the elders as they watch their pensions being reduced for the fifth time in two years. They are dying from this. The people my age and older, in their fifties, are also feeling the pressure. We are the generations that grew up in the years of the junta. We too feel the psychological pressure of a foreign power denying us our democratic rights. A close friend of mine who is an ambulance driver describes to me the shift in his job. He spends more time picking up forty and fifty year old victims of heart attacks and strokes than he ever did. "I use to be called mostly for accidents" he tells me. The feeling of foreboding, of things being beyond our control, of a twilight zone eeriness to our daily lives reveal our path. In the small town I am living in there are endless funerals. The tradition here is to post a small announcement on telephone poles and special billboards for this purpose. Every single day there seems to be a couple more funerals or memorials. I am certain that 2011 will be the year of the highest deathrate yet recorded in Greece. In our village church in the last year there was one marriage, one or two baptisms and 40 funerals. Not a typical year. Even in my neighborhood two men, one 48 and the other in his early fifties, died of heart disease. I will not even mention what I saw in the hospital. We use to be a healthy population with little or no heart disease. Seems like we are being liquidated...