20-5-94
I dream of a country where the whole is the sum of minorities and its history the history of the world. I dream of a country where religions are not sects, but a variety of voices to the utmost glory of God. Where Symeon will converse with Thomas Aquinas and the Quran with the Talmud.
I dream of a country where every turn of the road hides the mysteries of civilizations. Jewish shops, Turkish bazaars, temples, synagogues, mosques, dark eyes, and blond hair.
I dream of a country not so strong as to be endangered by its ambitions, nor so weak that it cannot sustain its diversity. This country existed. It was Greece. Greece of the spirit, tolerance, and history.
But today we live in Greece of fortification. Hysterically trying to preserve what it is not. Attempting to transform itself into a model imposed from the outside. Becoming a closed arena that crushes differences. Seeking a place on the chessboard of international xenophobia. Allowing the dark side of religion to obliterate the other, that of understanding and acceptance.
Fears, racism, complexes, xenophobia, religious and nationalist fervor, puritanism, and hysteria have found their place in the Country of Light and Measure.
Old and honest leftists, from the rubble of their wounded internationalism, become preachers of nationalism with slogans of patriotism, thus meeting their persecutors of years.
Innocent people, long protected from politics, inadvertently became tools in the map of political plans and ambitions.
Pious hierarchs and the faithful forgot the teaching of love and entangled religion in the competitions of power.
However, if we set aside the darkness of information and focus on the values of tolerance and equality, the values of Greece that we carry within us. If we decide to cut off the insidious tentacles of beliefs about racial and religious purity and silence the suspect cries of the champions of nationalism. Then the Greece of Magnificence, the country that was conquered by Rome not to accept Janus but to offer the Dodekatheon, which transcends borders, knowing how to assimilate differences, can be reborn. And this country that we love to become again one that allows and does not prohibit, one that saves the weak and opens its doors to foreigners, as in the past, the Greece of Light.
We are Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, pagan, atheist, agnostic, men, women, homosexual, black, yellow, white, blond, brunette, Albanian, Polish, Bulgarian, Turkish, Italian, German, Macedonian. We are Greeks.
Plato Rivellis