COMMENT: Some more equal than others

By Takis Theodoropoulos

I heard a report on the radio on Monday saying that the daily cost of feeding inmates at Greece?s prisons is 2 euros per person, for all three meals. That?s 4 euros less than the 6 euros put aside for each Public Power Corporation worker to have a cup of coffee and a croissant on their break. I wonder how much the meals distributed by the City of Athens and the Church of Greece cost?

Now, you may say I?m trying to compare things that can?t be compared.

The PPC employees must like their croissants stuffed with jam and cream and drink espresso freddo with lots of bubbly foam. After all, they have fought to save the economy and the country, while the other lot is just a bunch of convicts, the dregs of a society that relies absolutely on the production of electricity.

I am certain that every time the European Court of Human Rights condemns Greece over the detention conditions at its prisons, it fails to consider the priorities of social welfare and the humanitarian crisis that has come knocking at the glass partitions on the desks of our national corporation?s employees, who are also given a few additional days of holiday every year on top of what everyone else gets in order to make up for the stress of contact with the plebs on the other side of the glass.

But we are humanitarians, so don?t assume that we consider inmates, Greek and foreign, children of a lesser god. Quite the opposite. They too are the children of the same god who made all of us, only that there are those among the rest of us who are children of a higher god. To put it more simply, in the words of George Orwell?s Napoleon, the pig in ?Animal Farm,? ?All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.?

Of course it is a...