It’s Wednesday today. It’s the 28th day of February 2024. A day on which we turn the clock back one year to remember the railway tragedy in Tempi and wonder what has practically happened since then to prevent two trains from colliding head-on because they were moving on the same line in opposite directions…
If this tragic puzzle cannot be solved in the 21st century without the need for human intervention, I don’t know… Accidents always happen. And most of the time, they occur due to human or mechanical error.
However, in this case, where we lost 57 people, most of them young, including two Greek Cypriot students, we were dealing with a sequence of continuous errors. Each one of them has a direct connection with a series of “national pathologies,” such as:
Lack of meritocracy in hiring, favouritism and a ‘God bless’ mentality, inadequate education, nonexistent evaluation, union and local interests, lack of control (e.g., of employees who do not show up for work, or show up late), and even the inability to enforce laws even in blatant violations, such as those by groups of Roma people who remove power cables from various points of the country’s railway network and resell copper to foundries, making a profit!
After each similar ‘misstep’, it is impossible for someone not to hear the phrase ‘”‘the Greek does not change, does not improve.’
I disagree with this generalization. We all know who holds the country back – especially in the labyrinthine mechanism called ‘Public sector’, but do not think that in the private sector many ‘professionals’ do not resist modernization. They have a name and a clear job description. Let’s stop with the generalizations, like the one I just mentioned above.
Steps forward have been taken. Significant steps. Most of them concern the abolition of improbable bureaucratic procedures and ‘acquired rights’, to move entirely to electronic transactions.
Gov.gr has changed the face of Greece in many fields, but we still have a long way to go.
However, several professional groups still resist, for example, the obligation to have Points of Sale in their businesses, and everything to be done with cards. Obviously, they do not want to lose the ‘black’ money.
For all these reasons – and for many more – I have great hope in the already demonized Artificial Intelligence, by many outsiders who do not even know what it is…
PERSONA NON GRATA, with half a heart but also with my conscience clear: A monk in Ilioupoli, named Seraphim, publicly denounced PASOK MP Pavlos Christidis in his announcement, because he supported same-sex marriage and published his family photos with his wife and child, so that his crew knows who they are!
If our Christ lived now, who said “love one another” and “do not judge so you will not be judged,” the priest would not be a priest today.
On the other hand, fortunately, Greece and its Church are not only that! This is what I want to believe.
Today’s Person of the Day is Palestinian Ahmad al-Ghuferi, who since the beginning of the war was working in construction in the city of Jericho in the West Bank, while his family and relatives were in Gaza.
On December 8, after an Israeli airstrike on the city, all his family members and many close relatives were killed. A total of 104 of his people.
“Now, who will call me a father?” he says in a poignant interview with the BBC.
(It is worth reading, here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68400463).
