Nikos Konstandaras

The climate crisis is becoming a direct threat to all. Extreme weather phenomena are accelerating in frequency and intensity, provoking death and disease, social and economic turmoil. Greece, Cyprus and other parts of Southern Europe are on the front line. It is possible that in 10 years their environment will resemble that of the Middle East.

Political parties, news media, trade unions and nongovernmental organizations lie together in a heap at the bottom of the ladder of Greeks’ trust in institutions, each with 1.9 points out of 5.

A year ago, American officials seemed satisfied with how the war in Ukraine was going, thinking that the longer it went on, the more Vladimir Putin would bleed out, weakening his military and his country. But even as the first year of the war showed up the Russian military's weaknesses, the lack of supplies and the general malaise caused by corruption, the second year has shown the extent to which Putin controls his country and all the levers of power, and Russia's endurance.

We are justified in often feeling that we are Fortune's playthings. We must admit, though, that perhaps we are luckier than we deserve – that with our lack of foresight, with the carelessness with which we so often operate at the collective and individual level (whether running a railway or just driving our car) we could count many more victims than those that we frequently have to register. Thursday's revelation that 314 bombs from World War II have been found on the grounds of the old airport at Elliniko, in an area that was frequented by many people over the years, confirms just how dangerously we live and how lucky we are.

The way those who govern divert responsibility from themselves is a running sore in Greek politics and society. Governments do not evaluate their performance so much on the basis of their successes and failures but rather on whether their predecessors were worse, or whether their would-be successors would be even more so. And so, we are in a perpetual twilight between the failures of others and the dangers they still pose.

A premise in the introduction to an interview with the author and playwright Gillian Slovo in The Guardian struck me. Attending the American production of the play “Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors,” the journalist Emma Brockes noted that she thought the story of a fire in an apartment block in London in 2017, which killed 72 people, would be a “tough sell to American theatergoers.” Then she added: “Towards the end of the play, however, when a survivor suggests the fire wasn't caused by the system being broken but rather by the system performing exactly as built, the audience at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn broke into spontaneous applause.”

The time demands that the European Union acts. The problems are evident, from the two wars on its borders and the climate crisis, to the demographic collapse of member-states and the tremors in the international system of political and economic governance.

The tragedies at Mati and Tempe, and what followed, strengthen the lack of trust which nests inside us and determines how we see the world and what we do. Our state tricks us repeatedly. It gives the impression that it learned something from prior errors, only to prove once again that the latest tragedy was avoidable, its handling woeful (if not criminal) and that our polity still does not know how to gain citizens' trust. We feel insecure, realizing that bad things are not prevented, no one is held to account, the victims are left to their fate, and that all this keeps being repeated.

These days of Easter, when we meet with beloved family and friends, and count our blessings and the dear ones lost, as we celebrate nature’s renewal and the expectation of Resurrection, our minds turn to a group of our people who were cut off from the nation’s body at a very young age and are now trying to win back the Greek citizenship.

An 18-month-old girl in England who was born without hearing can now hear almost perfectly, after a brief procedure that resulted from decades of research. Using a harmless virus to carry a specific gene into Opal Sandy's ear, doctors at a Cambridge hospital compensated for the faulty gene with which she had been born. This leap in medicine was made public at the same time that the leader of “the world's greatest nuclear power” (as Putin describes Russia) warned of the “danger of worldwide conflict.” Thousands of children have been killed in Gaza. And many scientists have expressed the fear that the planet's heating is greater than the efforts to control it, posing a threat to humanity itself.