I tweeted my observations about the riots in Athens on Tuesday and Wednesday. Someone at the BBC must have been checking hashtags, because they contacted me to ask my opinion about the unrest.
Not just my observations, but my opinions - did the police overreact? Do I support the protestors? How does the feeling on the street compare to what I'd find back home?
And the longer the interview went on, the more I realized - I don't have the grounding in Greek society to pass judgment on it.
My connection to Greece goes way back - it's my mother's home, and we visited often when I was young, so she could see her family; and when I was at odds looking for work about five years ago, a family connection popped up with an offer of an internship, which led to a job offer, which led to my moving here.
To stay, I claimed dual citizenship through my mother's native birth; shortly after, I was drafted for a brief hitch into the army; then I learned that I had a legal obligation to vote in elections, which might be called at any time.
The first election, I got caught off guard, not even knowing where my polling place was (I later learned that even though I live in downtown Athens, I have to go to an outer suburb to vote; it's even worse for others, who have to go from the city to remote islands to cast their ballots). The second time, one of my cousins offered to drive me out to the polling station, and I spent what felt like half an hour puzzling over what felt like fifty different paper ballots, without a clue as to who represented what position, and even unclear on the mechanics of physically casting the ballot (it wasn't until the runoff election shortly thereafter that I realized you're supposed to pick the slate on one sheet, seal the sheet in the envelope, and then give it to the election workers, and I only figured that out because I asked for a pen to write something down and was told that I didn't need it).
Stuff that must have been covered in civics class, perhaps, but because I was schooled back in the US, I never got those lessons. Outsider.
Back in the army, whenever I stressed out about understanding shouted orders, I was told to relax, that I'd be a great soldier if I just relaxed and went with it, and did the minimum on stuff like cleanup duty and the like. I didn't understand the Greek mindset. Outsider.
There was a big swearing-in ceremony, which I was excluded from, because I wasn't Greek Orthodox and there was a different oath for non-Orthodox people. Four of us took that oath, out of about six hundred in the regiment. Outsider.
I got latrine cleanup duty when the regiment assembled for church services. Then when the regiment chaplain learned I'd never been baptized into any religion, he practically ordered me to arrange baptism with a priest the next time I was in Athens. Outsider.
I just don't have the cultural grounding of the people on the street, whether they support or oppose the government, or the protestors, or the unions. I didn't live through the junta. I wasn't here when Andreas Papandreou expanded the civil service. I didn't make it here for the Olympics.
I'd be tempted to say that the violence is due to anger boiling over, but then I also had the misfortune to get caught in a crowd leaving an Olympiakos soccer match in Piraeus a while back, and there were rowdies there too, doing stupid, crazy stuff, like throwing explosives onto the train track (scaring about five years off my life in the process).
There are people who just want to smash anything that gets in their path, so long as it's not theirs, and there are places in the city that are safe havens for them - places where the law does not reach. It's something to do with the junta and the resistance back from '67-'73, but I wasn't there, so I don't understand.
I thought once that some of the lackadaisical, carefree attitudes I saw in some Greeks was instilled by the army experience, by people learning to do the minimum necessary to get by, even if it left a mess behind. A female colleague of mine shot that down; if that was the case, she pointed out, then there wouldn't be so many women with the same attitude. Her words, not mine.
Or maybe it's something residual from the centuries under hostile foreign rule, from the Ottomans and the like, and the protests against the junta, enshrining a sort of contempt for authority.
I just don't know. Without the cultural grounding, I'm not competent to pass judgment.
Well, for the most part. Hell will freeze over before I offer support to anyone who sets fires, and I'll be dead as Cheops before I approve of anyone who throws a Molotov cocktail.
The Marfin fire was just over a year ago, and it was too close for comfort - less than two blocks from my office. More people died in that fire than in the incident that sparked the December '08 riots.
"Eat the rich, burn the banks", the graffiti says all over the center of Athens.
There's a bank on the ground floor below me right now.