Redux
Every journey circles home
I am trying to describe this tormenting cycle, thoughts that revolve around engagement with current affairs, with public life and politics, the news that journalists swallow every day and spit back to the world as if it were self‑evident that everyone cares or understands, the budget, the Cyprus issue or problem, the prospect of a new round of settlement talks, the negotiating table, the confidence‑building measures, the missions of the UN and the EU, and I feel an impulse to go out into the street, to start asking people what CBMs are, when Cyprus takes on the European Presidency, whether it means that we all move to Brussels, how long does a Presidency last and who takes over next, and then I think of George Gavriel, who made the news again, I keep thinking of this artist whom a lot consider undeserving even of speaking or painting, as if there were some invisible committee deciding who has the right to depict Christ or the Cyprus Presidents, former and current, and who must remain silent, as if art were a state privilege and not a human need, the Budget is voted and I wonder what it really means that it “passed”, who voted for it, which parties that is, and what this entails for the state and for me or my mother's pension, and in a few months we have elections again, the parties, the ballots, the lists being completed, the positions shifting as if they were discount coupons, and amid all this the journalists who know the answers not because they are more enlightened but because they have access to the source, to ministries, to representatives, to authorities, and they feed the algorithm with information hoping that some citizen will read and learn something useful, and then all those immersed in current affairs appear in the media and on social platforms speaking among themselves as if in a closed club, and then, ah then, you turn on the radio, choose a programme where citizens call in, those who drive, who have children at school, who shop, who que up at the ER at the General Hospital, who live here, pay taxes and produce tremendous quantities of garbage, and then you realise how little of this information actually reaches the public, how words like Cabinet and parliamentary, CBMs, bi‑zonal, evaluation, federal or Maria Olgin sound, you realise that those who think they are experts speak inside a bubble, while the rest live a different reality, a real reality, and on days like these, you know, end of year days, when it is customary to review and take stock and to think of new beginnings I wonder whether any of this makes sense, whether it is worth reconsidering collectively, or simply continue out of habit...