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Persona of the year
by Thanos Kalamidas
2011-12-30 10:25:41 |
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Customary most of the magazines and media this time of the year go through the year’s events and try to chose the persona or the events that impressed them most under the title ‘persona of the year’ and Ovi magazine was no exception from its birth. However last year we didn’t and the main reason was not that we couldn’t agree on the person or the event but the feeling that events had not unveiled yet, that there was something missing before the person or the event put the final mark of its role in contemporary history. It was just like Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize. He took it because he inspired a certain moment of history a lot of people but this moment in history now, after four years in the leadership of the world’s dominate power looks a bit …premature.
Last year most of the magazines and the media awarded Wikileaks founder Mr Julian Assange as the persona of the year and that before we see that he had a very dark side and thousands of conspiracy theories leak the net. And then the last month I saw in the cover page of a world famous magazine the picture of a demonstrator as the persona of the year. But the demonstrations just started, the social uprising in the west is still in a place where they try to identify themselves and their battle. At the moment most of them demonstrate in tents and sleeping-bags; unemployed yes but not yet dispirit and hopeless. They still have a house to return and food to eat and they are worrying for the future not for now. When now becomes the issue then the demonstrators will become persona of the year, a dangerous and threatening movement. But we are still not there.
And then it is the Arab spring. But we all saw how short this spring has been in Iraq or in Egypt most recently and how quickly was replaced by a Taliban style winter. And how many more lives this spring will cost to the Syrian people before the Iranian motivated and manipulated Taliban take over and push their winter? Or it was the end of Colonel Gaddafi where justice met injustice in the most incorrect political correct/convenient execution the event of they year. And then it was the South African meeting for environment, where all nations put the final tombstone on the grave of Kyoto protocol?
And please don’t let me start with the financial situation, the euro crisis and the conditions in Greece this moment or even touch the decadence of the union that was dreaming and aiming to unite the Europeans. Barroso, Merkel and Sarkozy managed to kill the faith to the European Union building an Orwellian bureaucracy that serves the banks and the share holders all around the world and the numbers have much more meaning than the faces, the names and the hearts.
Terrorism is the other chapter that follows us the last ten years and this year while hunting to kill Bin Laden we created the absolute boogieman. A boogieman that costs billions of Euros and dollars every year, much more than education and healthcare cost to all the nations on earth put together. And the Orwellian state I mentioned before in its peak in the name of terrorism. Just think, there are places in London where in only some seconds you are separately photographed over two hundred times from different cameras in the name of …terrorism. Talking on the phone, sending a personal post using the internet and a message using your telephone is not considered anymore a private and protected issue but a tool to catch terrorists. And Guantanamo might closing but who knows how many other Guantanamos are all around in the name of terrorism. Eternal president Kim Il-sung is dead but supreme leader Kim Jong-un just arrived and Mugabe is still ruling Zimbabwe. And what happened in Norway in the summer shows us that terrorism has no colour and we are all equally targeted but most importantly shown us that cameras and sophisticate weapons do not prevent while the right information and education might have a chance but …cameras and weapons leave better profit so…
Sadly I’m going to repeat myself writing exactly the same things I wrote a few days ago on Christmas day, there are people who suffer and die from poverty even these days and embarrassingly in the beginning of the 21st century. Remember that even today 30,000 kids will die somewhere in this globe from lack of food, water or basic care. Remember that hundreds of thousands will find themselves in the streets without a settler and a lot of them will never see the New Year. Remember – and I’m saying that with great pain – that even in my country, the country where democracy and freedom born, kids are left without food because Europe cares more for the prosperity of the banks than the welfare of the people. Remember that every single soul we are losing is a loss of our future in the universe and eternity. For this year kids are, at least for me, the persona of the year; they are because FOR ONE MORE YEAR THEY HAVE SUFFERED MORE THAN ANYBODY ELSE, because for one more year they should be the focus of our collected efforts and because for one more year WE FAILED THEM!
Ovi+Health Ovi+economy Ovi+environment Ovi+politics Ovi_magazine Thanos_Kalamidas Ovi |
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