Pains

I’m in pain.

One pain is the pain of my wisdom tooth that was recently taken out. The amount of pain comes and goes with the drugs, and I’m feeling more than a little woozy, but it’s better than it was on the first day. Still, it will take some time before I feel even remotely OK again.

The other pain is the pain of reading about Greece. The amount of racist nonsense that’s being presented in the media is just disgusting. Facts are thrown out the window in favour of absurd clichés and stereotypes and the complexities of the situation are neatly ignored. Greece is presented as a country without civilization, a bunch of uneducated leeches stealing Europe’s money. One article (in German) even says that, for nationalist reasons, Greeks still give their children heathen names. Heathen! Yay for the great German Theocracy, I suppose. The article also accuses Greeks of keeping their alphabet for nationalist reasons – because they’re the only ones using it, so clearly that’s barbaric and behind the times. Not, you know, just their alphabet.

And in Greece, of course, all this is fodder for the right-wingers and the racists. So the racism of Europe is doing wonders for the racism of Greece. Thanks, guys.

It makes me sick. It all makes me sick.

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