The Lighter Side of Two Wks. of Demonstrations

The youth, & otherwise ("Otherwise? Otherwise, who has the time, or the energy? Ay.")* have been at it in Greece for two wks. now. There, value is assigned to human life. Plenty talk of valuing life in America, yet murder, by the police & everyone else, is a daily, hourly occurrence in the land of the free. The general reaction? "Meh, whaddaya expect?" (Abortion, of course, is another matter.)

And people, just look at the fun they're having in Greece! This is just the overnight report:

Hundreds of people gathered late Saturday in the Exarchia district at the site of the December 6 shooting of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos for a protest organised by youths occupying Athens Polytechnic.

Protesters hurled firebombs at police who responded with tear gas. A group threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police and set fire to garbage bins, acts often seen in Exarchia since the boy's killing.

You're saying that it's become performance art, somewhere on the formalized to ritualized scale?

Police also clashed with protesters after a separate demonstration against racism that was attended by around 200 people in Syntagma Square.

"Migrants are killed, schoolchildren are killed," said banners carried by the protesters who marched to the Greek parliament.

Protesters threw garbage at police who ringed a Christmas tree on the main square. The tree was brought in last week after the original was torched at the height of unrest following the schoolboy's death.

Later, a group threw a petrol bomb at a building housing a banking services company, although there was only minor damage and the fire was quickly brought under control.

In Nea Philadelfia, a western suburb of Athens, demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails at the police academy and torched six police vehicles parked nearby, without causing any casualties, police said.

Another group of youths set fire to garbage cans in the northern suburb of Aghia Paraskevi.

[...]

In the northern city of Thessaloniki, youths occupied a hall being used for a film festival while others pelted the city mayor with pastries, police said.

Masked youths Friday attacked the French cultural institute in Athens after about 1,000 students and communist activists staged a march to condemn a second shooting on Wednesday in which the son of a teacher's union official was slightly wounded.

Protesters demanding justice over Grigoropoulos's death continue to occupy hundreds of schools and many universities across Greece.

The Athens Polytechnic, site of a 1973 student uprising that hastened the fall of military dictatorship in Greece, is among the occupied campuses.

And Europe is becoming a true community.

German police on Saturday arrested 10 people and suffered four injuries in fighting with demonstrators staging a rally in Hamburg in support of the Greek protests, officials said.

About 1,300 police were mobilised to monitor the approximately 1,000 demonstrators who marched to the Greek consulate in the northern port city.

Tear it up, righteous youth from the cradle of democracy! (It needed a cradle for some time after the ancient Greeks birthed it, as it was a weak & fitful concept.) Squash the fascist insect!! At least keep pelting police w/ garbage & mayors w/ pastries. And don't let that new X-mess tree go unburned. 

Hoping this advice is worth every drachma you paid for it, we remain,

M. Bouffant, Armchair General of the Revolution,

*who appears to be channeling an inner wretch rather than an inner child. Or may be channeling a second childhood sort of an inner child.