The Baby Picture

Baby pictures are cute and funny and all that, yet I find that there’s also something unnerving about them. When I look at my own baby pictures, I know that they are the pictures of me, who is still alive, yet at the same time they portray someone else who might actually be dead. You see, these baby pictures are of someone who was supposed to turn into something, but am I what this someone was supposed to turn into? Because if not, then it means that what I am looking at is not really me; it is the me that could have been, but has not been, and therefore now is dead, if you know what I mean. OK, I have to admit these thoughts were not always my thoughts; they were once the thoughts of one Marsha Norman, whose play I got to read in college. Her thoughts, in combination with the thoughts of one John Stuart Mill, seem to have found fertile ground in me to grow and eventually become my own. Here’s what Marsha and John whispered to me all those years ago.

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. (John Stuart Mill – On Liberty, 1859)

Mama: You are my child!
Jessie: I am what became of your child (Mama cannot answer). I found an old baby picture of me. And it was somebody else, not me….That’s who I started out and this is who is left (there is no self-pity here). That’s what this is about. It’s somebody I lost, all right, it’s my own self. Who I never was. Or who I tried to be and never got there. Somebody I waited for who never came. And never will….I’m what was worth waiting for and I didn’t make it. Me…who might have made a difference to me…I’m not going to show up…. (Marsha Norman – ’Night, Mother, 1983)

Of course Norman’s character is not content with her life and is actually considering suicide, which is not the case with me, but what she says does actually make sense.
And can one honestly claim that we people develop on all sides like a tree, as Mill says we ought to?

The chubby baby with the huge eyes staring beyond the frame most probably did turn into the alien that I am, but can anyone really be sure?

And one final thought: because of all of the above, in a way, baby pictures are actually the only visual documents we have of our TRUE selves; because in us, as babies, lies our true POTENTIAL self, which might find the necessary space to grow (like a tree) but also it might not...

The Recycling Bag

When about 2 years ago the Athenian municipalities placed special recycling bins all over the city, they also handed out special recycling bags in order to encourage, I thought, the citizens to recycle. In my area, if you happened to miss the door-to-door distribution day, you could actually go to the city hall and, after signing your name, get one of those bags. I always thought it was very considerate of the municipality and the whole having to sign for a bag procedure made it, I thought, even more official and serious.

Last year I moved from the suburbs, where I grew up, to the centre of Athens, i.e. to the largest municipality and, naïve as I am, I went to the city hall to ask for a new bag, since the old one I had left with my mom when I moved out. I could see in the face of the man at the information desk that he thought I was weird; he did play along with the weird one, however, and told me that I had to visit the sanitation department, but because it was far away, he offered to call the department and ask if they had any bags. The lady on the phone most probably also thought that I was weird, however, she did offer to keep my name and number and after consulting with the head of her department, who would check if they had any more bags, call me back. Of course I never got a call and I never got my bag. Am I surprised? Not really, especially after hearing the man on the phone referring to the recycling bag as “the recycling bag we used for advertisement”. So the bag was not handed out in order to encourage recycling, but in order to advertise it, as if it were a new brand of detergent: “Try recycling; it’s good for the environment!”

Is it surprising, then, that many citizens thought that the recycling bag is a fashion statement and an alternative to a hand bag (you can still see them going around town with their blue recycling bag)? I mean even the government treats recycling as a trend that might stick or might pass; as a product that we might want to buy or we might not. Recycling is not something you can advertise! Recycling is and should be a way of life; something you have to encourage people to do, if not enforce (as is the case in other countries). I mean let's face it, recycling is nowadays a necessity. But the municipalities are not campaigning for a better world or a healthier planet; they are advertising. And on a more cynical note, they are not even advertising recycling; they are advertising themselves: “Try us, we are good and trendy – we have an ecological conscience” And of course an ecological conscience they have not and will never have; the ecological conscience is only a façade that they put on for the eyes of the E.U. and for the eyes of the citizens during election periods.

The majority of this country will never grow an ecological conscience because there’s no one to help them grow one; because no one truly cares. And those that do care cannot do anything about it, because the others do not let them. When I first moved to the center and brought my garbage for recycling to the bin near my house, I found it filled with common garbage. And when I went over to the young (!) man working in the bakery just across the bin and told him to keep an eye on the people throwing garbage in the recycling bin, I got the answer common to all that is going bad in this country: “What do you expect me to do? This is Greece you live in!”

Countries do not change from the outside-in, but from the inside-out. A country does not change simply because the façade (in this case the façade being the recycling bin) changes. In order for the country to change, the people must change. And in this country the people will never change because generations upon generations of citizens keep perpetuating the habits and beliefs of those that came before. And no government and no educational system can change that. Despite appearances, this country is doomed to forever remain a third world country and it’s not just the fault of the governments that come and go, but mostly of the people, because, after all, it is the people that make the governments!