Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

Because of the new tax measures and the burdens imposed mainly on middle and lower incomes, letters of protest, reports, and appeals are being published by those who are affected and wronged.

A medieval-minded "tactic" is being followed: it is not the citizen but the subject who addresses the "ruler" and "governor," in the hope that he may deign to cast a compassionate glance upon the needy.

What is missing is the pride, honor, and dignity of the citizen who has and claims social and political rights, as well as rights secured by morality and law, at least the elementary ones, the human rights.

Power, in all three of its expressions, legislative, administrative, and judicial, does not tolerate the citizen as a bearer of rights and values. It does not tolerate him as its equal and, in many cases, as superior to it. It wants him cowed, complaining, protesting, exhausted. It wants him to crawl and beg.

In this context, the letter dated 28.07.2012 from a professor at the Polytechnic is striking; he protests to the minister of finance about the self-evident. His income is being drastically reduced, even though he is the father of six minor children, for whose sake he is forced to devote the last resource earned from his work.

The protests of the father of many children were formulated after he received his tax assessment notice from the tax office, by which he was charged four of his net monthly salaries.

This burden arose because a sudden and drastic reduction of the tax-free threshold for large families was decided, abruptly increasing, as the professor precisely stresses, the annual tax by approximately 3,000 euros.

The professor supports his protest with arguments and logical thoughts, concluding that this situation of irrational taxation, especially of large families, "will lead to extreme despair, with most painful consequences for these families and for the country."

Yet protests, observations, and criticism will not improve our economic situation. The saying applies here: "at the door of the deaf..."

We will see improvement only if the government, any government, whether of three, four, five, or one, together with the citizens, and not with the "masses" and "classes" mentioned by Marxists and others, who place the adjective "popular" before masses and classes, comes down to the world of reality.

In other words, complexes, fixations, populism, Balkan party factionalism, and clouded thinking must be abandoned. We must understand, and admit, the mistakes that were made through acts and deceit, or also through the inertia and omissions of the majority.

It is inconceivable that we, the majority, should be a people of incessant protesters who judge, criticize, and condemn. Concrete acts are required.

The guilds must disappear immediately or, in the worst case, suspend for a few years their activity of demolition, ceasing to sell protection.

The parties are required to abandon unrestrained and uncontrolled party activity and the totalitarian Goebbels-like war of destruction against society, putting forward reasonable, feasible, and achievable proposals for solving social, economic, and national problems.

No extreme cries or extreme actions are needed in our tiny country, which needs its citizens to become active and conscious, true citizens who care about one another and all together about the whole.

To find urgent solutions to pressing problems, not only economic ones but also broader social, educational, migration, cultural, and other problems, what is needed, simply and only, is compliance with the rules of common sense.

These rules require

(a) a mild political climate of cooperation, without extremism and head-on clashes,

(b) an invitation to the capable and specialized, preferably from the distinguished cosmopolitan Greeks whom we drove off, blow after blow, into the diaspora and who are free from the Balkan complexes of misery, to assume corresponding sectors of political, economic, and governmental action, regardless of party affiliation and label, equipped with their remarkable command of languages, their many years of experience, and their recognition across the globe,

(c) immediate actions that will disturb and cleanse the deep-green swamp of inaction installed by one of the political factions in 1981,

(d) a change in the behavior and action of the cadres of the other faction, which brought back the retired "ethnarch" in 1974, with an immediate repudiation of the neoplasm of favoritist governance through the appointment of relatives, friends, and acquaintances, and

(e) social control of the three powers so that excesses, arbitrariness, state callousness, and intolerable injustice against the weak may be limited and, finally,

(f) sincere concern by the comfortable and prosperous, who are not few and who, in their overwhelming majority, come either from party networks or from the favor of corruption and bribery, for the oppressed, the socially wronged, the deprived, and the weak.

For these reasons, protests, appeals, supplications, and pleas to power must cease, and action must be undertaken by citizens, bearers of incorrupt and genuine power, who must become active and not remain private individuals.