From Greece
Letter to My Parents
Dear Parents,
I know that I owe you a lot. You gave birth to me, you gave me to drink, you fed me, you brought me up. You even loved me. That’s what you say at least. Because things are slightly different.
You got me here, in a world where you were forced to abandon me every day & run to jobs. You got me here & then started looking for a place you park me in. You kept taking me to school and, because this was not enough, you kept sending me to a bunch of private tutors & lessons, plus you planted in me stress about my precarious future. Since my future was supposed to be so precarious, since you even made this planet dangerous, why did you get me here? What’s my life? Those two hours of TV & video games every day?
I want to see the world, to spread my wings & fly & see everything in a single moment. I want to get out, to meet those others, to play, to entertain myself, to feel joy & not to care about the fact that tomorrow I’ll be going to school without having studied. I want to dream a world where people won’t be looking for a place to park me, where they won’t be always having work to do, where it won’t be dangerous to meet other people, where future won’t be scaring me, where there’ll be no masters & no slaves.
I watch your misery but I’m not used to it & I don’t want to get used to it either. I won’t bow my head just because you did. I don’t want to become anyone’s slave or master, I want to be left alone.
Those uniformed hound dogs don’t scare me, I’m not afraid of them. You see in them a certain order & security. I’m the one to be taken for a ride, because I see perfectly well that this order is hypocrisy, & as for security, it’s themselves that form the gravest danger.
They’re the symbols of authority. Yours, that of the teachers’, of the politicians, of the grown-ups that live this way. You learned how to live like this, I haven’t. If they want to mess with me, so much the worse for them. They’re hopeless & let this be imprinted in their minds. I’m outraged & dangerous. & there are many of us, girls & boys, we’re everywhere, even within the murderers’ homes. They cannot hide from us, no matter where they stand. In one way or another, we’ll remain standing, they won’t.
Don’t be mad at me, I’m doing what you taught me to do. You told me that revolt is chaos & destruction. Now that I’m revolting, you’ll receive chaos & destruction.
I love you. In my own way, but I do.
But I have to make my own world so that I live my own free life, & to do this I have to take down your own world. This is what’s most important to me. To phrase it in your own language: this is my job.
