The fact that national anniversaries, such as the 25th of March and the 1st of April, intervene in our daily lives, so monotonous and tedious, to at least evoke a faint pride, a dignity, might say something.
Once they were immeasurable in scale.
Now we can search for some meaning in them, even vaguely some content.
Just to “bind” and justify even their mere formal maintenance.
However, the same question continues to torment us: What’s the point of parades, hymns, bombastic celebrations when their content contradicts today, with what constitutes our “normality”.
The contradictions we experience – from the principles and values ​​of the past to today’s culture of opportunism and grabbing – surround us consistently from all sides.
In the spirit of the times, the incompatible can be reconciled.
This is the new order of things that we so proudly celebrate and glorify every day.
Freedom, derived from the sacred and the holy, the bones of the Greeks, according to our national poet, we see today being exhausted in sterile slogans and debased in its real content.
We honour with so many tributes struggles for freedom, but with the deeper tissues of it completely stripped, such as sacrifice, and true patriotism.
All these are sacrificed today at the altar of recklessness, interest, opportunism, power-hungry ideologies, the struggle of individualistic interests.
We honour national anniversaries with all their brilliance, while at the same time everything is structured towards phases of dehellenization and violent detachment from anything related to roots and tradition. With our deeper being.
The only element we carefully preserve is the verbose speech and the exemplary coordination in the contradiction of what we proclaim in relation to what we do and act.
Sacrificial life as an experience is buried in the abyss of past and mostly forgotten greatness…
Otherwise, these are days that require representatives of power to stand on platforms, puffed up with pride, to parade in front of them the uninformed youth or even military units and fragments.
A youth that otherwise is always on the dock because supposedly it is partially or fully ignorant of the celebrations.
While the elders take such care to know and experience…
The essence of national anniversaries remains constantly sought after…
Because it has long escaped from our daily lives, as a deeper experience and life.
But we can compromise on the formal and ritualistic… These are also something.
