More Reportage From Athens

My friend in Athens sent this yesterday:

You know, there is really hardly any way to explain this, because I can't see this sort of hoo-ha happening to this extent in the States, for various reasons (to be explained later if you are interested), but there has been huge civil unrest on the part of, um, disaffected youth. Who are, en masse, burning down buildings, firebombing various offices and banks and storefronts, looting, burning cars, smashing windows, throwing rocks and sticks and molotov cocktails at police and on and on. Started, so they say, when a 15-yr old was killed by police gunfire (very very rare here) after he and a couple of cohorts overturned a car and attacked the police. Turns out that the cop fired three warning shots, one of which ricocheted off of a building and hit the kid. Which is only to say that this was not a police killing in cold blood.

They say that the killing prompted the riots but one begins to think that the mayhem was already afoot, the kid part of it, and then escalated when the anarchic elements here found a convenient excuse to go on a total rampage. The police have very limited powers here--almost no enforcement authority, and so they have been largely standing by as thousands of black-hooded teens and twenty-somethings lay waste to downtown Athens. Monday night was the worst when we could see large swaths of downtown on fire from our balcony.

Fortunately, despite firebombings happening right in this very neighborhood, the hoodlums tend to shy away from direct bodily harm (unless you are talking about the police) so it's a matter of trying to stay away from the fray and go about one's business. We are still out there doing the grocery shopping and getting to the park. Hm.

The good part? Greeks don't tend to bear arms. So we are not talking about hepped up wackos running through the streets with firearms. Rocks and sticks and what have you, just like they do it over there on the West Bank is good enough for us, thanks. But of course that makes a difference.

Needless to say, we are happy to be leaving next Thursday for xmas in New Mexico. I think that after four days of this, we're heading toward calm. The grossest part for me was leaving the apt. with the kids on Tuesday morning and noticing immediately that my neighborhood smelled like Ground Zero.