While the middle class is dying, the ranks of the disenfranchised swell

by Jim Meek

The Greek Financial Crisis in Three Acts. Act 1: The Acropolis, Athens. “It all started with the Greeks.” So says Maria, and she doesn’t mean the latest global economic meltdown. Maria’s a tour guide we meet among a pack of feral dogs that make their home on the hill below the Acropolis. The dogs sleep in the shade on paving stones through the hot days of mid-September, unperturbed by mobs of tourists who step around them or pause to take their photographs.

Maria is protective of the dogs and impatient with the tourists. A woman with the girth of an opera diva and matching voice, she wants us to understand it all. So she tells us the story of Pericles, the leader of Athens during its Golden Age 2,500 years ago. Pericles broke bread with Socrates and Herodotus. He championed arts and literature. He gave every citizen a voice in governing Athens, when it was the wealthiest and most powerful city state in the known world.

Pericles also gave every slave a pick and an axe and sent him to work in the quarries that produced marble for the greatest architectural project in history, the construction of the Acropolis. But Maria will forgive him his slaves. For in building the glorious city on the hill, Pericles also created the European middle class, the craftsmen who perfected their skills on the project, the creative classes who sculpted the statues of Athena, and the traders who trucked raw materials or sold food to the workers. And it has been the middle class, insistent on its rights and determined to make its way, that has kept democracy alive, if not always well, for the past two millennia. And it’s the middle class that is now dying in Greece, Maria tells us, even as the poor line up at cashier counters at Walmarts in America after the welfare cheques come in. 

Act 2: A Sidewalk Taverna, Naxos Town, Naxos Island. “It is nothing,” says Yiannis. He wraps his bear-like arms around both of us and kisses me on the cheek. Yainnis, our hotelier a few days ago, has bought us a bottle of wine. It’s a gentle September evening on the Aegean—the 16th, my birthday. Children ride bicycles on the square. Couples stroll along the promenade.

Yiannis is a card-carrying member of Maria’s dying middle class. He clings to the middle by working 16 hours a day. In the mornings, he and his sister and his mother serve breakfast to their guests on the hotel terrace. During the day, he drives repeatedly from the beach town of Agios Prokopios to the ferry terminal in Naxos Town. 

Yiannis greets disembarking passengers, offering them a clean and friendly place to stay. He’s not alone. Yiannis calls the clamour of the ferry terminal, with its throng of travellers and dozens of competing hoteliers, “our own Afghanistan.” At 6 p.m. every day, he cleans the pool. “It takes 90 minutes,” he tells me. “Scandinavians love the pool.” Late in the evening, he drives back into town to meet the last ferry.

We read in the English-language newspapers that northern Europeans resent working hard to bail out Greece so its pampered citizens can retire early and enjoy the good life. Yiannis is not among the fabled and the fortunate so described.

Act 3: A Kitchen in Halifax. “Enough is enough,” a 50-year-old Greek civil servant tells The Wall Street Journal. I read the comment online, a few days after our return from Europe. It’s Oct. 5, the day of a general strike in Greece, and the civil servant is attending her first protest.  On the same day in New York City, a swelling crowd gathers at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, in the shadow of the bank towers that to them symbolize a ruinous greed and a waste of human spirit.

What’s it all about? Well, the middle class is shrinking dramatically throughout the West as the concentration of wealth grows, while the ranks of the discontented and the disenfranchised swell. I go back to Pericles, who, facing a similar crisis in the wake of the Persian wars, commenced one of the largest public works programs in history.

And as Maria reminded us, the old Grecian ideal of success did not involve accumulation of private wealth but rather the achievement of great things, by which she meant the attainment of goals that are in the public good. So enough about productivity, and innovation, and economic diversity, and all the tired buzzwords that dominate the droning public conversation. Yes, these are important, but it’s the context that matters. What we have to do most urgently is rescue those marching in the streets from hopelessness. 

Our societies are never going to give all people an equal chance, but surely at this stage we can give more of them a fair one. 

Jim Meek is a freelance writer and a principal of Public Affairs Atlantic. He can be reached at  jmeek@paatlantic.ca.