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The Greek Tragedy

The austerity and loss of financial well-being confronting the people of Greece is graphically described in this op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times.   Of concern must be that countries like Portugal, Spain and Italy also possibly face economic gloom and doom.

"It’s stunning here in Athens to see many traffic lights not working, to see beggars pawing through garbage for food, to see blackened ruins of shops burned in rioting."

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"The overall unemployment rate here is 21 percent — 48 percent among young people — and the European Union forecasts that the Greek economy (and all of the euro zone) will shrink further this year."

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"I drove around Greece and found driving here easy because traffic rules don’t seem to matter. If you’re blocked by a one-way street, you barrel through in the wrong direction. Stop signs are merely suggestive. No-passing markers before blind turns mean: pass anyway, and pray. When an entire economy operates without rules, it has a problem."

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"“The state has ceased functioning,” editorialized an Athens newspaper, The Kathimerini.

That’s an exaggeration, but schools, hospitals and social services are devastated. Staff at some halfway houses for the mentally ill haven’t been paid for six months, and electricity has been cut off. “And it’ll get worse,” predicted Dr. Cristos Panettas, the chief psychiatrist of the Psychiatric Hospital of Attica."

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