A letter to a proud modern Greek

The Greeks are dead. They gave a lot to this world but they ceased existing a long time ago. Their culture and their beliefs were very diverse than those of present day Greece. Why don't you claim as yours something that is truly yours. Something that you helped create. I understand that a country that only started existing 150 years ago, at a place where there was nothing much to start with may be at a disadvantage but that is no reason to retreat into metaphysics and mythology. Be a man and face reality.

I have no issues with my origin. Greek or Eskimo I do not give a fuck. I look at today and tomorrow and I don't let a past that is heavily propagandized and serves all kinds of political purposes decide who I am and more importantly who I will be and what I will be like. This is one of the reasons that I feel so American. Being American is more than anything else freedom to be whoever you like connecting with other Americans not because they have the same faith, culture, aesthetics or ancestry but more than anything else because they all (or most) deeply believe in this freedom from predestination, freedom from race and ethnic background, freedom to express your potential to all its beautiful and unexpected colors.

What moves me? What do I associate with? I can tell you I sing along "...the land of the free and the home of the brave", shedding a tear each time. When the twin towers collapsed I did not sleep for 3 days. I love philosophy too and I study it on a daily basis, but for me it has no colors, nor is it Greek, French, German or British. Maybe surprisingly (not for me though) very few "Greeks" study philosophy. Do you? Have you produced anything written on the subject as a proud Greek?

So, to conclude this, I feel the intellectual connection to the Greeks that any person of this world would or could feel. I consider people who claim to be feeling more than this victims of ethnogenesis and their own vanity.

Finally, here is poem that I wrote when I was also momentarily taken by the idiocy of feeling Greek:
http://fotios.org/node/980

A modern Greek responds: Why didn't you sleep for three days when the twin towers collapsed? Did you have any relatives? I guess that you do not sleep a lot when people die, like in Iraq, Afghanistan, India (from earthquakes).

Actually I had quite a lot of friends in the area; but that was only part of it.

First of all, obviously, it is wrong to compare natural disasters with terrorist attacks.

Second, terrorist attacks of this sort are psychologically destabilizing for various reasons - not the least because they remove even the slightest trace of humanity that normally exists even during war. Remember for instance that when the Germans invaded Greece, after Greece had valiantly pushed back the Italian invaders, they allowed the Greek soldiers to go home after saluting them for their bravery. Even the Nazis had their bounds.

Third, a terrorist attack on a US metropolis is more than an inhuman attack on thousands of non-militant people; it is an attack on the very essence of what the whole western civilization stands for; that's your civilization also (supposedly) . A mix of people of various races and faiths brought together under the auspices of a free (or quasi so) market, a scientifically predisposed epistemological attitude,  a belief in technology and its promise for human survival and evolution, a positivist humanism and a deep faith in democracy and egality.

A modern Greek is offended by "Have you produced anything written on the subject as a proud Greek?": Am I obliged to produce anything written?  Is this a rule?

Well, not a rule, no. But it would help demonstrate your Greek link. I mean these ancient Greek guys they were pretty thorough and loved writing. They loved to put together painfully detailed records of their thoughts. They loved dissecting arguments using logic. I mean they wrote all this stuff and they had to chip it on rock or painfully write it on vellum and other crazy media. Today's "Greeks" they got word-processors, but they don't write. They got books and they read sports newspapers more than anything else. They love conversation but only as long as it does not entail painfully checking facts and getting background info.

So, what happens is that once Greeks leave Greece and start to gradually lose their badly engineered lopsided culture they start taking part - much more than before - in the creative process of today. Why? Because modern Greece lives a self-injuring myth that should have never been. A fairy-tale that generates an unbearable incongruence between the facts any learned person will eventually discover and what a modern Greek's whole upbringing and cultural background has taught him his whole life.