When 60 years ago, our great teacher Evangelos Papanoutsos, wrote about the “Epic of the Machine”, no one would have believed how quickly it would become a reality. He was writing then but we were not listening to him.. If he were alive now, I wonder what he would write about the atrocious genocide in Gaza that even the U.N. has turned a blind eye to..
It is time to listen to him now.. And to remember again his entire era.. Which marked not only our generation but also our entire modern Greek history..
It read: "Is the "machine", this astonishing human invention, a materialized thought or an endless source of antinomies? Does it improve man or make him like it? Rather the latter, we conclude. It dries him out, makes him act. It dissolves him. It empties him of humanity, makes him a pile of mathematical units.. He enjoys nothing, feels nothing.. Surrounded by the huge factories that we built by burning our forests..
Let us hope that that feudal era will not return, when the inhumanity of the strong meant a higher duty and the timidity of the weak meant cowardice.
If our teacher, who left us 40 years ago, were alive today, he would see with unbearable bitterness that that dark era has almost come again.
Just like our generation, especially on days like these in 1944, we were celebrating the end of the occupation and the first days of our freedom that we did not get to enjoy. The civil war brought us back to the feudal era of the “greats” of the world.
Now we read about the global giants of wealth and... we brag..
We hear about the terrifying ecological disasters and our time is passing, watching them on our colorful channels.. Two-fifths of our fellow human beings are hungry..
"Beautiful world, moral, angelic .."
An inhuman world that you can now see growing in our homeland.
The superiors on the one hand.. And the cowards on the other..
The generation that grew up with Papanoutsos' anxieties is slowly leaving.. It did everything it could, sometimes right and sometimes wrong..
But today, we hear from the generation that holds the present and future of our country in its hands... Sometimes full of despair and sometimes with a restrained desire to do something.
For what was not done, for those who did not take care of it in time, for our indifference, for the thousands of burned trees, animals, houses. For the oxygen that we will miss. For the enormous ecological disaster. For the villages and settlements that are being evacuated, that are disappearing, that are turning into coal. The city sky has taken on a gray and brown color.
Once again this year, ash coats cars, sidewalks and balconies. The difficult days are not over yet...
And another voice of a new theater group that dares, denounces and dreams:
Work and festivities will come again, with hugs and kisses, young and old,
With journeys and dreams, like brothers we will live. With love and struggles, we will find life again.
Everything passes and good things come back..
We sing it too .. Maybe because we also want to believe it…
photo source businessrise design
