“ASK NOT what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country,” President John F Kennedy told Americans in his inaugural address 52 years ago. Those were different times, but this exhortation is more relevant today than ever before. It certainly applies to today’s Cyprus where avarice and self-interest have become our society’s dominant values, with organised groups’ interest only in what their country can do for them.
This mentality has been evident for years, with citizens demanding state assistance whenever they suffered some reverse, but it scaled new heights in the last few months when drastic spending cuts by the state became a dire necessity. Nobody was prepared to make the smallest personal sacrifice for the good of the country, insisting that somebody else should make it. Unions representing privileged public sector workers wanted businesses to make the sacrifices and state school teachers wanted the millionaires to pay up, while other groups simply demanded they were exempted.
It is not just the unions that have been protesting. The members of the association of families with more than three children were at the presidential palace and outside the legislature protesting about the reduction in child allowances, while student organisations have been staging demonstrations against the decision to restrict the recipients of the student grant, which was given to everyone, regardless of family income. These groups would not care if impoverished pensioners were given a lower pension so that their benefits were safeguarded.
This hideous me-culture is incompatible with the staunch patriotism everyone loves to advertise. But is our patriotism limited to verbal outbursts against a Turkish intransigence and the UN? Are we patriots only as long as love of country has zero-cost, but as soon as we are asked to give up a tiny fraction of our earnings, our commitment to the national interest evaporates?
The one time everyone should have asked what they could have done for their country in order to save it from bankruptcy, they all went into hiding in the hope that someone else would ask the question. But nobody asked the question. Instead, everyone was advancing arguments as to why their interest group should not give up anything for the good of the country.
Cyprus society was not always this selfish. In the past, there was a strong sense of community and a public spirit, which have all but disappeared. What is to blame – consumerism, affluence, individualism, urbanisation, television – is not for us to say. What we can say is that we need to rediscover the sense of community, the idea of helping others and the ability to see beyond our personal interests, all of which, once, were features of our society. But we have lost our way.
