The Smile of Little Children
AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original
A headline, on the front page of one of the many vulgar daily rags.
“The Wrath of the Lambs.”
Anyone who searches will have no difficulty seeing
that, even when I speak of Kathimerini, I am speaking of all the newspapers in the same establishment milieu, merely under another alias.
Cheapness has more than one name.
Close your shops for four hours, then reopen.
Four hours of protest.
Then, back to normality.
So we do not inform on one another.
So we can show we are still “resisting.”
So we can count our numbers.
And at the end of the day,
everyone back in the same setting again.
The Vulgarity of Irony and Anger for Sale
And along comes a woman.
She makes a vulgar gesture.
And everyone says: “There, that is anger!”
Because anger has become an image.
Because anger has become a product.
Because if you do not have a powerful image, you do not exist.
You are not angry enough, indignant enough, alive enough.
But there is something worse than anger.
And that is needing it.
Justice as Ritual
And what does justice mean?
What does it mean to demand a conviction?
Will anything change?
Will anyone return?
Or will we simply say, “at least someone paid”?
And when someone is convicted, does injustice grow quiet?
Is it erased?
Or does it merely change hands, pass to the other side, become silence again?
A Human Being Does Not Need a Judge—They Need Another Human Being
The human is not only error.
The human is the inconceivable vindication that needs no courtroom.
The human is not a political matter.
The human is not a prime minister, a ministry, a president.
The human is the human being.
And if democracy forgets this foundation, then what is it?
A well-groomed lie that writes “the wrath of the lambs” and thinks it has said something clever.
The Smile of Little Children: A Position That Cannot Stand
It is not an answer to the wretchedness of insinuations.
It is not an answer at all.
It is a position that cannot stand, because understanding does not always have its feet on the ground.
Because the human cannot fit into the arithmetic of justice.
Because a child, if alive, would not say, “vindicate me.”
They would say, “do not let them make you like them.”