Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Crisis reveals perversion of democracy


AFP PHOTO / Aris Messinis

All nations at important moments in their history face pivotal moments when they must urgently address pressing matters of great collective concern if they are to avoid regression. ... such a moment has arrived. Unfortunately, neither of the two major political parties that have taken turns to govern the nation ... have displayed the administrative competence or the intellectual understanding now required to address the ecological threat confronting the country. ...

The nation is in dire need of new, bold, courageous leadership. It urgently requires a long-term strategy that pioneers will a sea-change in the country's approach towards the environment. Shortcuts will be very dangerous. Complacency may be fatal. Moral consciousness must be awakened and a grand vision needs to be developed to avert the nation's ecological collapse. ...

It is a genuine shame that a country that gave form and shape to democracy and civil virtue and once prided itself on the cultivation of aesthetics as the true meaning of life today displays astounding mental perversity in sacrificing the environment and its ecological system on the altar of greed and political clientilism.

Has Al Gore completely lost it? It would be hard to blame him.

But no, the author is Chronis Polychroniou, head of academic affairs at Mediterranean College in Athens, bemoaning what the current inferno in his country has revealed about its polity.

On the second anniversary Hurricane Katrina, when our system let a major city drown -- probably for Republican political gain -- we should find this all sadly familiar.

What are we, and the Greeks, going to do about it?

1 comment:

June Butler said...

What are we, and the Greeks, going to do about it?

Jan, that's the biggie. What, indeed? Methinks it's going to get a lot worse before we wake up to what we have wrought. By then, it may be too late.