Ordinary Stories of (Un)Ordinary Lives

About a year ago, I was walking through downtown Athens, lovingly stepping over homeless dudes, heaps of garbage and sidestepping stones and Molotov cocktails.  Dodging a cop’s night-stick, my gaze fell on one of the gazillions of posters put up by ‘disgruntled youf’ in Greece.  By ‘disgruntled youf’ of course I mean unemployed/bored and/or slightly malcontent people between the ages of 17-30, half of whom should be at home doing their homework or actually IN their classroom, and the other half trying to find a job.  In other words, ‘neo-leftists.’  But I digress.

Looking at this poster, I realized that beyond the asinine calls for releasing some dude who had completely destroyed another dude’s corner-store in the name of liberty, fraternity and cheaper cell phone rates, this fucking poster actually had some pretty badass art going on.  Someone in this city had actually put some effort into photoshop’ing the SHIT out of the riot cop who was depicted on it smashing some person’s face in with his boom stick…  Nice!  ‘Artistic integrity’ was all over this poster.  Soon, I noticed that there were dozens of amazing posters illegally plastered all over my fair city, turning it into a potpourri or not-so-good-to-fucking-brilliant street art.  Kind of like an urban Deviant Art with less titties and more hammers and sickles liberally sprinkled into the mix.  I concluded that these were heady times and got back to my normal daily routine of talking shit about the government while doing absolutely nothing about anything other than looking for a job in another continent (which I finally found and here I am…!).

Months later, it was December of 2008, and all hell broke loose in the thrice-blessed city of Athens.  Everyone decided it was time to spring clean the downtown areas, and that paint thinner was their cleaning agent of choice.  Meanwhile the police was at their annual ‘Dazed And Confused/Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ Double-bill social mixer so apparently did not realize the enormity of the rioting situation until… the City Christmas Tree/Ent was burned down causing untold dozens shame and horror at losing something used pretty much only to keep the rain off of two homeless Somali dudes at night.

After the riots, I showed up in the fair city of Athena, trying to get my vacation on.  And boy did I.  (That’s ANOTHER blog right there…)  But I noticed that there was something missing from the street art.  THE ART.  Most posters were now just a long litany of inane horse-shit trying to get parents and other grown-ups to forget that 99% of people under the age of 30 these days simply suffer from ennui, and a good daily dose of being beaten with a wet hose while in a burlap sack would rid them of their existential angst, break their fingers so they can stop twittering and sending SMS messages, and maybe open a newspaper to get a job cause there’s a few Everests out there who need an extra pair of sweet, sweet sandwich-wrapping hands.  (Excuse the long sentence; it’s the stream of consciousness again…)  I would include myself in this group but I am in Africa trying to avoid polio, hepatitis E, hoof and mouth, cholera, collapsing buildings, falling planes and stray 7.62s.  Meaning I consider myself chastised and muted these days…  Still, if I was there, like I said, I would dutifully show up for the beatings and bring my own hose.

So the art was gone.  Gone were my photoshop’ed riot cops, quasi-Soviet monumental art of hot babes in bandanas, pine-apple grenades, and random pictures of 14 year olds wearing Palestinian scarves.  In their place were polite graffiti asking for the release of ‘political’ hostages, mathematics (1 Policeman = 1 Bullet), and naturally, lots of sports graffiti, because no matter what happens in society, 7,13,21 and 4 are just as important as health, education, law and the environment.

I am sorry that the art has gone from the posters.  It was good when anarchy was artistic.  The permeation of innovation and creativity in Greece’s left was a sign that maybe ideas would change after more than 50 years of the same crap.  I dislike the Greek political right; it’s become a bunch of small-dicked fat dudes trying to get jobs for their cousins from the village in the ‘big city.’  But the left has been hitting them over the head with ridiculous ideas and the worst of it is that while you can’t blame the leaders of the left (Papariga and the other assholes) because they’re just doing their job to get paid, the messages they pass to the ‘disgruntled youf’ were showing their age about 20 years ago.  Today they’re so old someone should be digging them up in Alberta and carbon-dating them…

I say bring the art back, and let innovation and ideas trickle back to Greece’s youth in a more constructive manner.  Because we gotta do something to make it better for all the tripped out drug-addicts downtown.  What the hell will they trip on now that the art has gone?  Pepper-spray?

Note:  Some may say that I am mixing up anarchy/ists and leftism/sts.  Yup!  In my view, there is an unhealthy lack of distinction between the two in Greece among young people.  Mostly I think it’s because most young people choose a belief based mostly on an attempt to make sweet loving to that hot babe/dude who’s spouting the same shit in their University class.  And that’s fine.  Because if they didn’t do that, they wouldn’t be young people.  But that’s only cool until a certain age.  After that, it’s not prudent to not read and be able to distinguish between Marx and Bakunin.  Bakunin was scary.  Marx was just German.

For years and years, everyone’s older grandma and auntie from the ‘burbs in Greece would exclaim with horror the above, comparing Greek realities to that of Uganda in the 80’s and 90’s: Civil war, atrocities, insecurity and human suffering counted in the millions.

It seems to me after one year of living in Uganda that over the last few years, we’re trading ‘realities’ between the two countries. Gone are the days of mass unrest and war in Uganda, to be replaced with endemic, almost professional corruption in government, horrific urban sprawl, environmental degradation, geo-electoral politics and district manipulations, and monstrous down-town Kampala shopping centers calculated to fatten up a politician’s pocket, rather than input into the local economy or raise the economic indicators of a specific area. The capital city and its environs are benefiting from years of humanitarian and developmental aid, much like Greece in the 80s and 90s hijacked almost all of the European development funding for ridiculous horse-shit in Attica, leaving 95% of the country to wallow in its pig farms, dying island communities and dangerous roads. We laugh at the pace that the Ugandans have to enlarge the Kampala-Gulu road (about 300 kilometers) but that’s a mistake when we see how long it’s taken to build the Egnatia Odos in northern Greece. Difficult to complete a project when half the money is badly managed. Like a retarded child trying to finish a finger-painting while eating the paints. And like the Olympics, Uganda had its CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) in 2007. They must have had Greek advisors, because all it meant was monstrous hotels being built (which now enjoy a significant 5% occupancy rate), roads being ‘remade’ (not all pot-holed again), and, in true Greek spirit, the whole issue benefiting everyone except the citizens of Uganda. (Remember having only one lane in Athens?)

In Greece, the European funds are almost over. Patience is over, the Olympics are over, our terrorists are back, the US State Dept. actually name-drops Exarchia as a no-go area. Wow. Exarchia now has its place in history, much like Karachi, Fallujah and the Al-Halili marketplace in Egypt. Good on us! Our cops are a bunch of fat 45 year olds who were shoved into the force because their mother’s uncle’s cousin’s farming cooperative partner knew a dude in the General Directorate of Fat Uneducated Bastards Who Need Work. When they’re ‘the new breed’ of cop, they are disgruntled 22 year old rural bumpkins who are so fed up at their lack of opportunities (remember that lack of rural development?) that they’re now in the cities and ready to take their revenge, by making sure University students (that ageless caricature of an urbanite) get ‘theirs.’

Last week, the newspapers in Uganda ran an article shitting on the government for the poor quality of its health monitoring of agricultural products, which is why such a green, verdant, agro-based economy like Uganda doesn’t export didley-shit to neighboring African countries or Europe. Sound familiar, DELTA/FAGE/EVGA? When downtown marketplaces burn down, the fire service is too late, or too underfunded. Sound familiar, western Peloponnese? I don’t know how Uganda keeps following the Greek model, because our own country can’t see fit to even place an embassy in Kampala, and has to make sure The Stamp of Authority rests safely in the hands of a (admittedly) very nice, but Very African Congolese-Greek who runs a coffee factory and is gone half the year. So I want to know: where are all these Greek development advisers who seem to be telling Kampala how to make Uganda in our own image, while sending back information on how to ruin a country, destroy everything dear, and completely disembowel the political system’s legitimacy with its European neighbors, Middle Eastern partners, and closest neighbors ‘to the east.’

We’ve even got a military relationship. Just in the same way Greece half-assed its way through a ‘regional security intervention’ in Albania in the mid-90’s, so did Uganda just half-ass its way through three months of “Operation Lightning Thunder” in northern DRC, in order to finish something that started on its soil. Just in the same way Greece didn’t want to prop up Albania when it needed it, Uganda kept fucking with DRC for years, invading it and destabilizing its capital. And all of a sudden, it found it needed its support. Too late, guys! Welcome to the reality of the regional monster you created.

And, true to form, Uganda is now picking on Kenya regarding… A DISPUTED ISLAND OF ONE ACRE ON THE BORDERS BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES!

We’re not becoming like Uganda, in fact… they’re becoming like us… Poor, poor Ugandans.

Note to self: buy stocks in feta cheese… can’t be long before Uganda starts trying to market it.

Imagine this: you’re a young boy, in your family’s kitchen, making coffee and realize you’re out of sugar. You step out the door to quickly borrow some from the neighboring family nextdoor…

You walk up to the front door, but it’s ajar so, knowing the family a little, you step in. You walk down the hall slowly, and hear rustling on the right, towards the living room. Looking inside, you see the husband fooling around with the piano teacher. You think, asshole. Walking inside you realize there’s an eerie silence, so you go to the kitchen, where you see the wife crumpled on the floor next to the garbage can. You run to her and realize she’s unconscious and not breathing. You remember CPR training from that summer camp so you begin CPR, thinking maybe you’ll save her. All of a sudden their young child walks in the kitchen, and stands there. You pause long enough to tell him to call an ambulance, and you see him do so using the kitchen phone.

Minutes go by, then more minutes. You grow tired. Your arms are in pain, your lips are completely slobbered, and there’s no change from the motionless body of the woman, although you at some point hear a couple of sharp cracks from her chest, signifying that you’ve broken her ribs. At this, her son, who’s been watching you all this time begins to cry and blubber, trying to push you away and impeding your attempts to keep her in life until the paramedics come.

You’re pissed off because you’re thinking what an asshole the husband is, what a retard the kid is, and where the hell that ambulance has gotten to.

Finally, your arms give in, and you have to stop trying. Fifteen or twenty minutes must have gone by, by now… You stand up, look around and realize you can hear sirens. Within a few seconds there’s two burly dudes who barge into the room, knock aside the child, break a chair, tread mud everywhere (it was raining, see?) and keep yelling at you ‘to get the fuck out of the way so they can do their job and why haven’t you done anything to help until now, anyway?’ They set up some fancy equipment, which you can’t even begin to comprehend, while you’re still in a painful, tired daze and one of them mumbles something about her maybe having cracked ribs.

At some point the father walks in zipping his pants, and looks around, having heard the commotion from when the paramedics came into the house from the back porch. He cuffs his son just to make the point, and asks what the hell is going on. Things go from bad to worse then, as you are studiously ignored, with no one bothering to ask you what happened, how you found the wife on the floor, where their son was, or what the father was doing. Seemingly forgotten, you get up and walk home, tasting nicotine on your mouth from the asshole’s wife’s lips.

At home, you realize you’ve missed dinner, don’t have time to do your homework, and, shocked from what’s just happened, don’t really want to hear about what your big brother’s favorite soccer team did that evening. So you go to bed and try to sleep but it’s a little hard and when you do, the dreams which you see seem to imply you’re at fault for not telling the father earlier that his wife was dying. Your sleep is unsettled and in the morning your arms ache. That morning you decide to become a paramedic, just so you can be nicer to the children you find in front of you keeping someone alive while you show up in faux-military boots and a crash-box. –The end.

Now replace the characters with the following and read the story again:
Unconscious Woman: Population in conflict/emergency
You: Humanitarian Aid
Child: International Community
Husband: Government
Paramedics: Development
Cracked ribs: Population dependence
1 CPR minute: 1 year of aid

I don’t think this is the perfect analogy but it was fun to write. I won’t explain it through again but I think you can get the main gist of it… I wrote it because I was skimming a book, which was yet another one of those who claim that humanitarian aid prolongs conflict and disasters by making them sustainable in some way. As a humanitarian (and I don’t mean in a professional sense) I believe that giving aid to those in need is a normal and logical part of the human condition. It is right and proper to give a hungry man a fish a day if you don’t have the means to teach him to fish. In my view, humanitarian support to a disaster or a conflict zone is only the in-between stage. What’s it between? It’s between the before: normalcy, peace, whatever you want to call it, and the after, when the government of the country, with support or not, begins to pick up its obligations to its citizens. When humanitarian aid seems to be sustaining a conflict, that’s only because the lack of political, financial or military means to end the situation makes the continuing provision of barely sustaining food, water, health, education services glaring in their ‘just-enoughness’ to sustain humanity in misery.

While at times this may be attributed to a congested political map or a difficult geopolitical question, other times it’s simply a matter of piping in money. The paramedics in this case, (ie: the development of a disaster-prone area, the paving of a road to create access to markets, the cleaning up of an oil spill, I don’t know, whatever) which, on its way to the scene stops to ask for directions, fuel the ambulance, make sure the house/family knows they are coming, call their mommas, etc. and when they finally get there, ask nothing from those who have been there years, act too quickly, or too slowly, or with hubris, vanity and a sort of dazed knee-jerk-ness. And yet they are angry that what? That there are still people left alive to benefit from the development? That there’s still a semblance of order, which the humanitarian aid coordination mechanisms have kept there? I don’t know and I am not sure.

What I am sure about, is that in most countries, the law protects a provider of first aid from lawsuits based on damage caused inadvertently to the victim they are trying to save/protect. If the law didn’t, no one would help. The neurosurgeon or paramedic which will see a victim 4th or 5th in line can make all the 20-20 hindsight judgments he/she wants. But the feeling of having been there first and made it alright for a bit, to the extent of your ability is humanitarian. That’s humanitarian. And that’s all right in my book. So sue me.