Some of you may
remember watching ‘Mister Roger’s Neighborhood’ on TV as a kid. I watched it
too. A kindly, soft-spoken man dressed in nerdy clothes showed us around his fictional
neighborhood, filled with polite characters like the friendly mailman. Well,
I’m not Mr Rogers but this is what I saw and heard around my neighborhood on
one recent day…
…I found myself at
the supermarket around noon, the worst possible time to be there. It was
packed, lines at the registers were long, and I gradually made my way to the
toilet paper aisle, weaving in and out of the crowd… worn-out mothers pushing
strollers, weary grandmothers leaning on canes slowly inching their way
forward, oblivious shoppers blocking the aisles with their overflowing
supermarket carts…
So there I stood in
front of the enormous wall of toilet paper when I hear a woman speaking loudly
into her cell phone and see her coming full force, barreling through the aisle
unmindful of the rest of us who were courteously trying to maneuver ourselves
around each other. We all overheard the woman’s very loud cell phone
conversation:
“…I tell you, I
prefer to just leave my apartment unrented. My son told me he wants to move
into the apartment himself but it’s on the ground floor and I’m worried he
might get robbed. These Albanians are unreal. They’ll rob and beat you so fast
you don’t know what happened. My own mother got robbed on the street, they took
her purse and dragged her to the ground!! Golden Dawn, and once again, I say
Golden Dawn is the answer!!” She pushed her way past us and disappeared down
the aisle filled with cleaning products. I stood staring at the wall of toilet
paper, stunned.
A few minutes later,
still stunned, I stood in line at the register. It was noisy, people were
cranky and bored… and then I heard the voice again, coming from a few rows
down. Over the racket I heard bits and pieces: “the first time, I voted for
Syriza…. then I voted for Golden Dawn and I will only vote for them now…”
I went home, rolling
my cart past a few empty storefronts, some beggars, the neighborhood pawn shop…
I turned on the TV as I put the groceries away.
The news was
reporting on the death of the last surviving member of the 1967-74 military
dictatorship in Greece, Nikos Dertilis at age 92. The ex-colonel had spent the
last 37 years in prison. He was serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of
Michalis Myroyiannis, a student during the Athens Polytechnic uprising. The
funeral was attended, among others, by Golden Dawn parliament members and their
supporters. In an article on its website dated January 29, Golden Dawn stated “…Greece
mourns the loss of a Man, whose life and work was mighty proof of the racial
continuity, in its most heroic form, of Greek Military History, which is paved
with blood…”
The funeral service
was conducted by Bishop Amvrosios of Kalavryta who hailed Dertilis as “a hero,
like Kolokotronis and Socrates.” 
A eulogy was given
by Grigoris Michalopoulos, (editor of the newspaper Eleutheri Ora) who said “a hero has gone, a hero like the president
of the Hellenic Republic Georgios Papadopoulos [president during the military
dictatorship]. In your last letter you told me that only the two of us have
remained. However, I say to you now that we number in the thousands.”
I listened to these
words as I put the giant package of toilet paper away in the cabinet. Then I
switched the TV off, thinking “it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood” and
wishing that I was merely experiencing the sights and sounds of a (warped) but fictitious Mr
Roger’s neighborhood.
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