Maria Katsounaki

A bulldozer is a statement of determination; it is even reassuring somehow when it appears in a news story on our television screens. It is a statement that the laws of the land are being upheld, whether it is demolishing illegal constructions or removing trash and debris from our streams and culverts.

“A line appears, the order wanes, the Family falls and Kaos reigns.” This prophecy runs through all eight episodes of Netflix's “Kaos,” a British dark comedy that has been topping viewers' preferences for the past three weeks and prompting to end of commentary.

Greek politics is not just revisiting the past; it's living in a bygone world. You cannot cure old-school political mentalities and pettiness with spin alone, try as you might.

Let’s agree that for years private education was demonized and that vested interests held public education hostage to the fixations of unions and civil servants. The decades that passed consolidated a specific reality in primary and high schools.

Nothing can really be regarded as “news” when it comes to corruption. Corruption is so ubiquitous, that nothing comes as a surprise anymore, nothing shocks us.

It is simply impossible to overlook the devastation in Valencia, Spain. Even if you were to try, the rivers of mud, the piles of cars, the rising number of victims, remain etched in your mind.

What is on the mind of an apartment owner who rents a 70 sq.m. flat, in an old building in Athens' central Pangrati district, for 800 euros? It is renovated, but it is squeezed in a narrow street, with a tiny balcony. It is not the only egregious example. Dozens of such ads for rentals are published daily or recycled in groups with desperate people looking for an apartment and telling their stories.

On the sidelines of the happy event of the inauguration of the Thessaloniki Metro, a merry-go-round of tensions and reactions has emerged. It is easy to focus on the occasional and ignore the timeless. Current events, besides being a mirror of society, are also a mechanism for reducing pressures. What the media was preoccupied with was a senior executive of a local soccer club who informed Deputy Minister of Infrastructure and Transport Nikos Tachiaos that fans of the team are preparing to “smash up” the inauguration ceremony of the city's new metro because their team was punished with two games behind closed doors.

Nobody knows what happens behind the closed doors of an apartment except the residents. On Friday, in fact, in one of the daily incidents of domestic violence, “the woman [the victim] denied that anything had happened to her while the alleged perpetrator confronted the police officers, telling them that they had no authority over what was happening in his house.”

Our indifference to the news that “business closures are overturned by courts” has an explanation: the many loopholes of the law. The ingenuity of the offenders is proportional to the flexibility (weakness) of justice. The bar in southern Athens that served alcohol to minors in October, some of whom had ended up unconscious in hospitals, reopened this week, despite the previous suspension of its operation by the Municipality of Athens.