Αληθινη Athenian Democracy

Exiting the Metro slightly ahead of me today were a well-dressed, slightly-older than middle-aged couple. At the top of the escalator they made a strange movement which, when I reached the top, I decided to investigate. In the end it was the most banal, yet most optimistic, thing I had seen in a while: they had left their Metro ticket stuck to the bar at the top of the 'down' escalator, so that anyone entering could take it and use it. Athens Metro tickets have a time limit of one hour and a half so you can have unlimited travel during that period. If, of course, your journey takes ten minutes, then there is still another eighty minutes of use left on it. Moments before, I had seen such a ticket sticking out of the validation machine at the entrance to the station proper, and for the self-same reason. I had learned about this practice some days before, and ever since then I have been offering my partially-used ticket to anyone entering as I was leaving.

On the face of it are a couple of things: it is, of course, illegal. Secondly, the tickets only cost one Euro, well within the means of (almost) anyone. Thirdly, the Athens Metro system (and its associated Proastiakos (suburban) railway), is very good; new stations have been constructed sensitively around the cornucopia of ancient ruins that live underneath the Athens asphalt, many of the trains are new, run on time (...Mussolini would be very proud...), and it is being extended, in all directions, in an intelligent way. All of this takes investment and, of course, one of the ways in which that money is raised is via the sale of tickets to travelers. On the face of it, then, this practice of 'ticket sharing' is harming all of this.

On the face of it...

I've been in Greece for the last two months or so, and I have heard, first-, second- and third-hand a collection of horror stories about life in a country that has been declared "toxic" by the IMF and the EU. I know someone who has been given two choices, either to lose her job now, or to work until Christmas but only being paid every other month; an acquaintance who works so many hours (10 a.m. until 10 p.m is not uncommon for him) that he is seriously considering giving up working for a while; a friend who has been paying the loan on his car assiduously for several years but who, upon missing one payment, is telephoned by the bank continually and without respite and threatened with all sorts of legal and beaurocratic comeback; someone else was told repeatedly that he would be paid 'next month' (and this went on for four months) until, one day, he was told that the company was bankrupt and that he and his colleagues were out of a job and, of course, the promised salaries had disappeared into thin air; another acquaintance and his partner were told that their insurance policies had likewise gone up in smoke because the bank they had been paying them into all of these years went under without a trace, and without warning.

What all of these people have in common is that they belong to "Η Γενιά των 700 ευρώ", the "¢700 generation" (read more about it here http://g700.blogspot.com/) (yes, I know; it's now a "sociological phenomenon" with a label blah blah...forget that for the moment...). With the IMF (the "Troika") flying in this month to give the Greek government a pat on the back for getting down on their knees so quickly, with the "voices of reason" urging 'caution', and 'tightening the belts' and 'pragmatism' so loudly, that generation is slowly, but surely, having its own voice drowned out. For obvious and understandable reasons (riot police and, hey, summer is here after all!) the steam has gone out of the post-'Alexis' anisyxia. So...

So...you do what you can do; give away your unused Metro tickets; the people taking them are the people who most need them. But they are also the people who most appreciate them, who will see that it is not just they who understand what is happening, but that the well-dressed, slightly-older than middle-aged couple still remember what it is like to belong to the "¢700 generation."