New life (Thomas Bergersen)
There was a thinker born during the reign of splendor of my mother, called Epictetus, who once said you only have to fear fear itself.
There are people who accuse me of having behaved during that dark period as if nothing happened. While people died around the world, beings like me among them, I continued my routine: woke up late in the morning, took care of the matters everyone expects from me as a nation in the political sphere, and my cats too, took walks, read, watched television, cooked...As if the world wasn't crumbling around me, they said.
But, was there a better moment to do those things?
They said I had to die. I prepared myself for dying, then.
During those times, I enjoyed more than ever what was around me, that world I had to leave behind. Everything has changed so much since I saw the light of the sun for the first time. I like this century. Through a screen I have access to the ideas of millions of people around the world. Never has a book been more accessible. Each day a new song is released. Just by visiting a supermarket I can prepare any dish I can think of. I also had my little pleasures, like hearing the purr of a cat while I rub his belly, or simply watching the sunrise and sunset. Those days I devoted myself to say goodbye to all of that. I devoted myself to live as much as I could, not knowing exactly when I would depart.
I let my citizens judge me without facing them and making an apology. I didn't try to play down the mistakes I made which could have made them hate me. I simply let everything follow its natural course.
When I saw that group of people approaching the Parthenon, carrying those demolition tools: hammers, chisels, jackhammers, I just breathed deep. My mother would have been hurt, seeing her temples, her memory, destroyed. But that's life. That's how History is built, sometimes on the past.
It was then when a human flood appeared, much greater than the one who wanted to erase the memory of the ancient gods and the civilization my mother built and left me as her legacy.
I saw men, women, young and old running to them with no fear, shouting at them, removing their hoods, grabbing them by the hair, tossing them to the ground, throwing their tools away. Kicking them out. They made them run.
And then they did what they always do in the toughest times, when it seems the ship is sinking.
Someone took a buzuki and people started dancing a zorga in front of me. They clapped. All of them with a smile in their lips. All of them singing aloud and looking at me.
I saw pride in their eyes. Support. Love. They did that to show me something, and show it to themselved.
What could I do but join their dance?
«Opa!»
They had decided. I respected their decision with the same calm as if they had chosen the best I could do was to disappear.
«Opa!»
