“Let’s not get used to death” reads a poster you see on walls around Athens. It’s a simple message: we should never stop being shocked by the death and suffering caused by the choices of European leaders and the Greek government. From suicides to “accidents”, the list of casualties has names added to it daily. From Dimitris Christoulas, the 77-year-old who, in April last year, took his own life in Syntagma square, to Babakar Diaye, the 39-year-old man from Senegal who fell on the train tracks from a great height and died after being chased by the municipal police in downtown Athens, the end result is always the same: loss of human lives.
But sometimes the going gets too much. Sometimes the morning news reads like a page out of Les Misérables. Last night, an 18-year-old died in the streets of Athens. Caught without a ticket on a trolley bus, he tried to escape the inspector who had just stepped on board by pushing the emergency button and jumping out of the door. He lost his balance and hit his head on the curb. After being taken to the hospital, the doctors pronounced him dead.
The scenes described by an eyewitness make the case sound truly appalling. He speaks of how the boy was trying to explain that both he and his parents were unemployed, and that he simply couldn’t afford the ticket or the fine. He speaks of the inspector physically assaulting him and ripping his shirt, and the bus driver joining in before the victim made a desperate attempt to escape. And he speaks of shocking scenes where the other passengers almost mobbed the inspector, shouting at him: “you just took a kid’s life for one euro”.
More shocking is the reaction seen by some using Greek social media – commentators, authors, politicians. “The inspector was only doing his job,” they say. “It’s not his fault if a freeloader decided to jump off the bus”. This was the death of a “freeloader”. Not of an unemployed kid with no future, but of a guy who simply didn’t feel like paying his fare. This mirrors the attitude some government officials have shown in the past, such as the newly appointed Minister of Health, Adonis Georgiadis, who took up the post in December last year. “Those that cannot adapt, die,” he has said.
In a tragic parallel that defies borders, almost at the same time as the incident in Greece hit the news, the Cheetham & Crumpsall (Manchester) police station account tweeted:
Just dealt with a Shoplifter at Tesco. The lady tried to leave without paying for some jars of baby food, two young children with her.
— GMPCheethamCrumpsall (@GMPCheetham) August 12, 2013
I don’t know the specifics of the case, but the tone is what gets me. The seemingly unconnected fact that she was trying to steal baby food with two kids in her arms. Just as in the case of the 18-year-old, the subject is disconnected from the cause. Poverty and the inability to pay for transportation or food, does not get in the way of the law. The haves are not supposed to empathise with the have-nots. So the list of victims gets bigger.
In Britain, the criminalisation of squatting cost lives last winter. Cheap housing is non-existent in London, and unused properties are boarded up to keep unwanted no-goods out, while landlords plot how to squeeze every penny out of the poor. Come next winter, train fares are expected to rise by more than four per cent, making commuting work even harder for those displaced to the suburbs. This same thing happened in Greece, making job-seeking impossible for many, even if there were jobs to be had in the nation’s ruined job market. What will it come to in Britain?
It’s farcical. The inequalities that triggered the Arab spring – whose unravelling we are witnessing today in Egypt – are being repeated in austerity Europe. The social fabric, the welfare state that held it together, is being torn down. If you become unemployed, the chances of you getting back to work get slimmer and slimmer if you don’t have some sort of back-up. In places like Greece, Spain, Portugal and now Britain, this a new, extreme reality. In this new reality, we could all end up being cast as “freeloaders”. And our deaths, be they the result of cold, persecution or despair, will be labelled as a “failure to adapt”.
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