http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite3_6_30/09/2011_408874
In reading this I thought how it sounds like much what we do in the US these days with the wingers willing to bet it all or lose it.
By Nikos Xydakis
The days of judgment proceed at a slow, tortuous pace. Greeks are suspended in a state of disbelief and uncertainty, their fates in the hands of the scowling old man Time, who at present is being less than benign.
Like playthings, Time has lifted Greeks up and spun them round and round, holding his scythe in one hand and an hourglass in the other as a reminder of the futility of their existence but also of the fact that they were completely unprepared even to grasp the magnitude of the crisis.
The Greeks had slumbered and slept, like the virgins in the Kingdom of Heaven, and the foolish ones among them took their lamps without taking any oil.
And so they continued to doze, as their state was sucked and drained, as it became devoid of all meaning, without structure and vitality, without results. They remained asleep, weak and deceived, tolerating wretched lords and mutual degradation.
Then, when Time unveiled his daughter, Truth, she brought nothing but grief to the slumbering Greeks.
Truth emerged not just as futility, but as shock and pain. And also as a bitter realization: The Greeks discovered that they have no state, that they managed to corrode it and debase it until it was no more, until the country’s schools, hospitals and transportation services were gasping for their final breath. They had abandoned it, left it as a trophy to the privileged parasites, the looters, who tore it apart like carrion, scrap by scrap, as the Greeks became transformed into scavengers, a plebeian mass, timid and weak-willed, dominated and subservient. They had confused plebeian impunity with freedom.
Here we are now, looking at the scythe. Will it be a haircut or a beheading?
And what about the hourglass, which runs endlessly as the old man, Time, turns it over every time the sand runs out, starting its flow afresh.
The unbearable present will pass; it will pass from our lives, the pain will end and a new flow of time will begin -- purging, liberating and revitalizing.
Truth hurts when it is revealed, it crushes us and then it heals us and brings us back to life.
Her name is Veritas Filia Temporis, Truth the Daughter of Time, and she is the Mother of Hope.
| 
