The first thing you have to learn is the language. The language that you know better than your homeland's is different here and is constantly and rapidly changing. Not at the speed colloquial language changes in european countries, but with the velocity of a speeding car going somewhere undefined, just like life here. This atmosphere directly affects written language too, directly – and there is plenty of writing going on here. On mobile phones and tablets, everyone is writing. Honest to God, Americans must fast be turning imto the most literate people on earth, even if it isn’t always top quality writing or its elaborate precision and perfection lacks soul.
The second thing you have to learn is that rules are rigid – especially the ones concerning privacy. If you break them, you’re done. Therefore, you either don’t break them or you become too good at breaking them to be caught.
The third principle is to learn how to overcome all difficulties moving forward. There is no other choice. Three blocks away, at a church belonging to one of the hundreds of christian sects here, a support group for people who lost a child meets every Wednesday at 7pm. Every Thursday evening, at the conservative synagogue, there is a meeting of people who have recently lost their spouses. “Ensure the continuation of your life no matter what” an attractive elderly lady shasays in a life insurance advertisement. And for every disaster – apart from financial – therapy is offered here whether in the form of a therapist, a support group, community services, the appropriate literature. “How to overcome what happened and move forward” is the message. It is out of the question to want to live out of the box, beyond these rules of rigid emotional and mental propriety. If you dare say you don’t want to get over something deemed "not good/healthy/fair" for you, even if you mean it and it is your choice, the choice of a mature sane person, still you will end up all alone–if not in a mental institution!
So you comply. Because it's "their way or the highway", indeed. Yet the more you want to comply with these rules in order to fit in and to be accepted, the more you empathetically understand these violent outbursts, these impressive self-immolations of General David Petraeus and many more before him.
In truth, at first, it is not difficult to learn to live under these limitations in a world you want to adapt to. Things here are so clear-cut they become simple: there are good guys – the Democrats – and bad guys – the Republicans – who are bad in such a grand guignol way that they promote the secession of several states they control (Texas, Tennessee, Florida) from the rest of the United States. If you hold any public office and you flirt – let alone do anything more than that – with another woman, not only will you be held responsible for risking security of the country, but you will also get Watergate reporter Bob Woodward defending you by saying that your “terrible mistake” is not a criminal of offense, and that “our thoughts and prayers are with your family”. Each person's family and private family is his own business, no matter who he is–here it is everyone's business defining your life even if it no longer does or never did.
In America, the more blindly and eagerly you crave acceptance from the people you admire, the more you get angry at Europe – where rights outnumber obligations at a state level and at a federal, EU level exclusively financial interests have been considered the only necessary element of unity. Now we are bearing the brunt of these thoughtless choices.
Patriotism and co-responsibility are not empty words here. At any given moment, there is something to remind you that the sense of freedom and this “something” the country possesses as an attraction for all the world to see, are not to be taken for granted “just like that”. A typical example is the back-to-back TV ads on Veterans Day, with the actors who star in the most famous television series participating pro bono and presenting the problems of soldiers as a sacrifice to the freedom of the people, a sacrifice that has to be honored officially, emotionally, financially.
Here, they make amazing movies and write amazing books about their history. We are being subjected to a benign round the clock brainwash about the apparently spectacular movie on Abraham Lincoln Steven Spielberg is making. In Europe, and especially Greece, we deal with our own issues only in a judgmental – not productively critical – and cynically ironic way – like the recent story furore over the theatrical play on Athanasios Diakos. Yet nations don’t move forward fueled only by sarcasm and irony.
Here in the States there is a special day here called “Small Business Saturday” when customers are encouraged to shop from small local stores only. “Support your neighborhood and your local community” goes the slogan, “because here small becomes big, yet to become big you need to be able to exist as small in the first place”. In this big, extremely big country, they respect that–always as a transitory phase of course, on the way to bigger, better, more lucrative things–contrary to the monopoly of the department stores that was blindly “imposed” on little Greece by EU bureaucrats who have probably never tried to make it on their own or in the private sector.
In this great – in many ways – country, you forget everything in order to learn it from the beginning. And you have to be careful not to start wondering how you got here, at a place where you feel lost and inappropriately unobtrusive. Because if you do wonder then you're done. Because this is the land of toughness-sometimes to an unnecessary extent, but I guess it grows on you and eventually becomes you in the end… So this is no place to waver and feel insecure, inconsequential; these feelings are as inappropriate as a stain on a blue dress that should never have led to the destruction of a charismatic president–and would not have in any other place in the world.
Yet things are not just black and white here; some, if few, undefined, "messy" areas in people here do escape the boxes set out for them. A small problem occurs and you seek help. In theory, you cannot even get medical advice from the local hospital; you are not insured, nor do they know you. What if you sue them after that, they ask. Yet they eventually take the risk and lend a hand. Along with that there comes a deeper consolation that even in this mundane, difficult situation you, the alien, has become accepted just for what you are: a human being.
