Dawn of the dead

They're not quite the undead. More like the soon-to-be dead.
The downtown Athens neighbourhood of Omonia has long had its fair share of junkies. Once the grande dame of the city, with fountains and well-manicured shop fronts, Omonia today is a dive. But the junkies? Wow. Never like this it seems.
The three zombies in the picture were shot (while one was shooting up) as riot cops had other things on their minds, like the October 19 general strike.
Spaced out, brain damaged addicts are now flaunting the authorities. They shoot up in plain site. They pass out. They score. For the most part there are no cops.
Probably the most disturbing scene occurred several blocks away, several days after the strike, just off the busy pedestrian walkway of Ermou, a Greek rioter's stone's throw away from the parliament.
Staggering towards me on a cool fall day was a man in his 20s, maybe 30s, who knows. Picture a zombie in Dawn of the Dead. That was him: shoeless, filthy and (reader discretion advised...) Um, how do I put this? You know that Saturday Night Live skit with Justin Timberlake and Adam Samberg, called "Dick in a Box"? Well, this dude could have used a box.
Yep, he was flying low, so so low.
So why?
Probably many reasons... general despair has to be on the list somewhere... But I'm thinking the cops don't give a shit any more (or the patrols have been cut to save cash)... and, I'm hearing that the state funding for methadone treatment has been cut, to what level I don't know. Obviously, not enough.

Fuelling the revolution

A friend of mine in Canada asked me about what was going on in Greece.

"I know it's tough as hell there," he said in an email, "but can you help me with the faraway impression? If the Greeks had just paid their taxes, we'd have had a better outcome. True? False?"

He also wrote that "we've heard all about helicopter cameras showing swimming pools in the yards of non-tax-paying citizens, etc., etc. [But] what's really up?"

This rambling response is the best I could come up with in a short time...

What's going on here in Greece is a class war. The Guardian published a commentary that helps explain some of it.

The pools? Get this... an envelop of money in the right tax collector's hands will allow you to dodge taxes on a pool because it's, um, not really a pool. Because, you see, I have this medical condition and I have it for therapeutic reasons. Also popular: explaining away the pool as an environmental solution because it's actually designed to, um, collect rain water.

I know someone who has worked in a public hospital for 27 years and was making 1,250 euros a month. Because of government cuts she's now making 800. Another person I know, who is an accountant and earns a similarly meagre wage in the private sector, hasn't been paid for September and there's talk of the business going under.

It goes on... A guy I know at the Athens News says reporter friends at other publications don't ask him how much he earns, but whether he actually gets paid. A freelance writer I know who was owed 750 euros for a job she did had to badger the publication for 11 months before she got paid recently. My friend, a school teacher, had his monthly salary cut by 500 euros. His wife lost her job. They have to pay for supplementary schooling for their teenage daughters because the public system sucks.

Generally, the poor pay their taxes... but yes, the civil services is bloated, a problem created by the country's two major, family-run political dynasties... handing out jobs for votes... and most people would agree that you can't continue to have one in four workers in Greece employed by the public service.

But equally so you cannot continue to have people not pay their fair share of taxes... take for example the doctor with an office in a trendy part of town who declares 15,000 euros in annual income... or whatever it was, but it was low as I recall.

What else... the violence in the streets... To an outsider like me it seems the violence has turned in a way that Greeks are now beating up Greeks. An example: on Thursday, members of the communist affiliated PAME union battled with so-called hoodies, made up of left-wing extremists and anarchists.

But the prevailing talk on the street is that these hoodie dudes are actually affiliated with the cops. One protestor said her PAME colleagues nabbed one hoodie guy on Thursday, stripped him, and spotted cop ID on the guy. Pix and video online purport to show hoodies getting out of cop cars before concealing their faces with scarves, gas masks etc. While the two groups battle each other, the riot cops watch.

Now what? Selling off public assets to private investors for a song. The end.

Not a pretty picture.

Athens Strike: Day 2

The concussion grenades sound louder than I remember them. Maybe the police in Athens put in an order for more powerful explosives since I left the city.

I went down to Syntagma Square for Day 2 of the national strike, staying on the periphery of the actual rioting. Within the square now, people wearing red T-shirts help those with deep gashes caused by thrown stones or police clubs. They have a little area roped off to take the injured, a place they can bleed together and be patched up.

Watching from a distance, I see the crowd along the road parallel to the Grande Bretagne hotel surge. They're panicking, spilling over a retaining wall and into the slippery water fountain there. Soon I see a man hobbling towards me, wet... I assume he's turned an ankle in the fountain or been trampled by the fleeing crowd.

Things are kicking off so I drift from the square, spotting along the way the burned out remains of the previous day's fires... ticket booths, piles of uncollected garbage... anything that'll burn.

Strategically, police on mopeds position themselves on the outskirts of the rioting, where they wait for orders. From these positions they can sweep in from behind the crowd and box in the protestors.

A helicopter hovers over the downtown crowd as parliamentarians decide who will pay what and how much. At the same time an unsteady junkie leans against the fence around Hadrian's Library in Monastiraki for support, contemplating it seems the tortoise shuffling his way across the ruins.

The fall of Athens?

It was tough when I first moved to Athens in 2007. Hot, no friends, no clue of where anything was. But eventually I got to know the city, and despite it being overrun by cars, it could be so fragrant... I remember most the scent of jasmine outside the Akropoli metro station, or the orange blossoms early in the new year.

But now... the only smell that leaves an impression is the stench of the mounting piles of garbage, the result of a too-long running strike by rubbish collectors.

Athens feels like what I imagine Saigon felt like when it fell. For the umpteenth time, the city was paralysed by a national strike today. Things kicked off around the parliament, not as violent as it has been, but still...

Afterwards, we walked to Omonia (see pic). The riot cops were ready to clamp down. In the pic, notice the junkies on the far right. The whole area is littered with these drugged out zombies. It was bad before, but not like this, where I'm always looking over my shoulder...

We met with a friend for a bite in the tourist district of Monastiraki. We ordered our food, but before it arrived, a wave of protestors. I went to look. Two young women with rudimentary masks (pic) hurried off somewhere. In the distance a pile of garbage burned. In the foreground, anxious protestors dressed mostly in black watching for the cops.

And the cops did not disappoint. They soon arrived on motorcycles, dressed in black armour, resembling Darth Vader, and scaring the bejesus out of people.

A crowd swarmed our outdoor dinner table, and forced their way inside our restaurant, they verged on panic.

Management lowered the restaurant's corrugated metal shutters. It was surreal. Here we were tucking into our meals, and here came the cops, concussion grenades and all. Stavroula started a coughing fit, the traces of tear gas tearing at her sensitive lungs.

Long story short, it's the shits here in Athens. We escaped to higher ground, and watched from just below the Acropolis, as flaming cardboard boxes ignited an awning belonging to a business. The black smoke wafting over the city of white. We could hear people shouting. I have to wonder whether anyone was listening.