What an irony!

What an irony

What an irony this is — and the gods will punish us for it.

There are people who collect bottles to survive. And there are people who hit a ball to survive: who collect points, who collect scores, who collect posthumous fame.

Before I go any further, a word about the photograph. I do not know the man in it. I never spoke to him. I do not know his name, his circumstances, his health or his story, and nothing written here is a claim about him. He is not an example of anything and he is not an argument. He is a person who happened to be walking down a street in Thessaloniki while I happened to be standing there with a camera. Everything that follows is about us — about me, about the way we have arranged our lives together. The photograph is only what set me thinking.

What an irony it is, then, when you look at the whole picture: people defined by political affiliations, by ideologies, tangled up in politics or religion.

But where will you find justice?

Where will a person in that position find justice? It is a fair question, and perhaps, sometimes, they never will. I mean every citizen in a vulnerable group — the "mentally ill," people with disabilities, anyone who needs more help than the rest of us.

And believe me, it is ironic that anyone should be going through other people's rubbish while we throw things away, and throw them away, and throw them away, as if there were no tomorrow. We don't donate. We don't give things away. We don't even sell them for a token price. We just throw them out. There are more treasures in a bin than in a chest. It's true.

Sometimes I think back to Chania, to the day I walked past a bin and found a medical encyclopedia inside it. Excellent condition, thrown out with the rubbish. Academic volumes, the kind you buy to study from. And I wondered: how did that doctor live? He must have read those books over and over to learn the terminology he needed. And in the end, his descendants decided the best place for them was the bin. What an irony.

Now, let me be careful here, because I am not building a case against football, or basketball, or the people who love them. A match is one of the few things left that can make a whole city feel the same thing at the same moment, and that is not nothing. The athletes work harder than most of us ever will. The joy is real. I have no interest in taking it away from anyone.

What interests me is not the game. It is where the money goes.

Because the money exists. We find it every year — for the ticket, for the subscription, for the shirt, for the transfer of a player we will never meet. We find the attention, too, and the loyalty, and the arguments that last all winter. None of that is forced on us. We give it, gladly, and we give it in enormous quantities. So the capacity is there. What we have decided — collectively, without ever having voted on it — is what deserves that capacity and what does not.

And we decide by looking. Whatever we look at gets paid. A person walking down the street with two bags is not looked at, so they are not paid. That encyclopedia was not looked at, so it went in the bin. It isn't cruelty. It's arithmetic — the arithmetic of attention — and every one of us is doing the sum, every day, without noticing that we're doing it.

And so we arrive at the irony of money and status: financial status, posthumous status, fame. I am not saying money isn't necessary. We need it for our daily transactions; we need it to survive. And we need a decent amount of it to live a life in which we can actually help other people. Definitely.

But as long as we keep throwing things away and buying things we don't need, our neighbour will keep going through the bins for our "treasures." And how does it all connect? With overconsumption, and with a culture promoted everywhere that pushes us towards quick decisions: fast fashion, fast technology, fast living.

"That's the world we live in, Giorgos," you'll tell me. And you would be right. It is the world we live in. But nobody handed it to us finished. We built it, and we keep rebuilding it every time we choose what to look at.

We live in a peaceful world. We live in a world full of opportunity. We live in a world where almost anyone can become almost anything they want — and we have taken all of that and used it to sort ourselves into people who are looked at and people who are not.

What an irony. The gods will punish us, and we will have earned it.