Бунтарский Шик (Если не можешь его победить - вылечи его!)

For a moment I am tempted to stay in, relax and enjoy the joyfully riotous spirit. For that tiny moment it feels as if we won last year, the Sunday papers remembering and documenting the Great Victory, the conference attendants hailing it. The dry sound of the police radio from the street hastily calls me back to reality. We dress quickly and take to the street. Soon we start seeing friends we haven’t seen in almost a year. “This morning I woke up to the smell of tear-gas and the sound of a police helicopter hovering over our flat”. Living in Exarcheia has turned into something quite different it feels. “The cops are just everywhere”. We begin to realise that some of last year’s familiar faces are missing. Many are tired. Some are scared, they tell us. Others just don’t like remembrance days. And yet a few hours later, thousands and thousands take to the streets, once more. Hundreds of kids pelt the riot cops with stones. A girl gets arrested a few meters away from us. Is she thirteen? Fourteen maybe? Later, motorcycle cops run over two people and a woman ends up in intensive care. I’m trying to picture the moment of her assault, frame after frame, in a two-page spread in next year’s coffee table book. It doesn’t seem to work.

[…]

The place is the exact point of the assassination, on the corner of Mesologiou and Tzavela Street in Exarcheia, Athens. The time is December 6th, 2009, late in the night, one year and a few hours past the moment when he was shot dead by the cops. Our spontaneous demonstration has just come to an end. Around one thousand of us gathered at the time of the killing, with no official call-out, no pre-planned demonstration and little but a need to remember and try (at the very least) to shatter the state of total control of the Minister For Our Own Good and his swine hordes. On that night, they are everywhere: every single street corner between where we are standing and the Polytechnic School is taken over by riot cop unit after riot cop unit. Many of us despair. We are never going to make it to the School. Suddenly, a few children start picking and emptying beer bottles from the ground. The oldest one cannot possibly be older than eleven, maybe twelve. He gives the word of command: “To the Polytechnic!” We are a bit puzzled. “Is there anything happening there right now?” He clings a bottle in each hand and starts banging one another. “Now, no. But something is about to happen”.

I have this strange impulsion to ask the kids if they read the papers this morning, to ask them if they’ll buying that hot new book for Christmas. I’m wondering what they think about it all, I’m trying to think where things are heading, how much longer this pervasive anti-cop rage can possibly last, where it could lead. But there is little time for any small talk. We follow them, past the first riot police unit. The cops look at each other, then take a step back. For a moment, a tiny moment, all the shiny books and magazines in the world feel so distant, the cops look so out-of-place, frail, insecure. Everything continues: at that moment, on that street corner, in the kids’ pockets where they swiftly shove the beer bottles, and walk on.