Les Misérables

All our lives we achieve feats. From young children this is what we are taught, this is how we learn to live. At school, at university, in the army, at work, in society itself. Some of us manage it easily, others more difficult. But all of us become heroes, we carry out social missions, we realize state pursuits and we manage to co-exist.
We are heroes, we achieve feats. We become more competitive, more profitable, more resilient, more efficient. At school we fly the flag, at university we win a scholarship, we serve in the army with pride, the bank we work for comes first in providing mortgages, our business flourishes, we get a promotion, our field bears fruit, our career shines bright, our social contacts are excellent, our family ties unbreakable, our name dignified. We are heroes, we achieve feats, we become the pillars of society. We support and support today's society that neither more nor less hides if not fosters another self, the one we heroes never really want to face – the society that failed – the society of the wretched.
In this society, sometimes it is a struggle to live decently, sometimes it is a struggle to survive itself. This society today does not - for the most part - involve an inferior species, some kind of "incompetent" people who failed in the field of life and ended up on the sidelines. This society is a creation of circumstances, a creation of us, of our actions or omissions, a creation of the society of our laurelled efforts and at the same time their most stable pillar. In the camp society of Bangladesh or the barren land of Nigeria the wretched are those who were never asked, who never tried, who never had a chance of their own. In today's Greek society, the miserable are those who have been sidelined by the international terms of competitiveness, debt sustainability, government deficit and thousands of other legal and economic terms, which they themselves are often unable to fully understand. Sometimes because their feats were not as great as ours. Sometimes because in a society that, in order to survive, needs as a stable background a strong margin in numbers to maintain and support it, poverty ends up being played in the Russian roulette of economic impoverishment.
But we are not here to overthrow the social order. We are not anarchists, nor fascists, nor communists, nor even leftists. We came to live, to be happy in our own way, even if it is precisely assimilating the dictates set by the invisible force of social connectivity. No, we are not heroes after all, even if we have achieved feats. And many a night we shall lose sleep if we continue to ponder how close the society of the wretched will always be outside our heroic, iron locks.
No, I'm not asking for violence from our current heroes. I am not asking for demonstrations, nor for upheavals. I ask what I ask from myself and from the society around me - education. Education to change the world. Every step we take, before we do it, let's take care first and above all, understand it.

Thomas Kalokiris