Unbearable grief, pain, horror, shame, uncertainty, and then rage and mass reaction. The scale of the tragedy in Tempe is such that its consequences are not limited to the families of the victims and affect society as a whole. Individual trauma becomes collective.

“pick me up when you arrive” which we all heard from our compatriots from time to time has become a cliché of our parenting culture, a slogan on the lips of thousands of students. Black balloons were released into the sky in memory of the victims, and the phrase “it was a bad time” captures reflections of citizens about “in which country we still live“.

Public anger is widespread and expresses, according to experts, the need to confront systemic injustice, which, in the form of chronic shortcomings of the state, makes the citizen defenseless not only against adverse circumstances, such as a natural disaster or pandemic, but – mainly – in the general inability of the state to provide elementary conditions such as railway safety.

And perhaps, as he says, the accident occurred in the context of a number of numerous tests that have befallen our country in recent years, such as the economic crisis, the destruction of the social fabric caused by it, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine – with an inflationary and precise energy crisis that it caused – but it has one important difference.

“The collision of trains and the death of our brothers who tragically died on the tracks are not part of the consequences of some global scale and the cause of an unfavorable event. It invaded with a deafening roar of the unjust death of our brethren, dispelling the modernizing illusions of a national course that, as it turned out, had been and remains frustrated throughout the post-colonial period. In addition, the economic crisis and the suffocation of energy precision have hit and hit mainly the lower and middle classes, the elderly, the vulnerable, and the unvaccinated against COVID-19. But we could all have died on this train, even if we were traveling first class,” concludes Mr. Liapis.