Graffiti, junkies and multi-drug addled mutts as signs of social decay

The center (even officially known as "Centrs") of Riga, where I live and work, is showing signs of profound social decay. If you accept the "broken window that doesn't get fixed" theory of areas spiraling downward into becoming crime ridden slums, then the signs are all over the place in central Riga. It is not broken windows, but spray-painted, artless, incoherent graffiti everywhere. I discovered this by going around on walks and taking photographs, mainly of what I think is "street art" type graffiti and noticing that there was much, much more of the incoherent, quickly daubed squiggles and tags type of stuff. It seems to increase from week-to-week.
Also noticeable is the number of people on the street nodding on heroin or intoxicated on substances other than alcohol (not stoned, but on something that, unlike grass, affects motor functions in a different way than the drunken stagger of alcohol). You see these characters even in the morning, along with drunks, the typical signs of urban social degeneration. As things look, the mutts* are getting the upper hand.
*From the Urban Dictionary:

A Mutt is a person who is a real lowlife, degenerate piece of shit who just never does anything right... The common Mutt can be found in OTB and the local bagel store buying lotto tickets every day of their lives and losing every dollar they have... Another type of Mutt will be high or drunk 247 and try to operate and have a normal life but wind up doing "Mutt" things.

Here are some examples

Basically, just "tags" and scrawls, propagating day to day.
For the record, on addicts: Heroin should be decriminalized and made available to registered addicts along with clean needles. There should be no "accidental death penalty" for being a fuckwit who gets addicted, nor should we be robbed by addicts who need to pay for drugs whose prices are determined by their illegality, not their cost of production.

Microincidents and social decay

I may be wrong, but often a "sense of what is going on" arises from a series of what could be called microincidents that point to a broader pattern of developments in society. Trend analysts often look at this as forerunners of something that may become significant (small groups of trendsetter teens dressing like, eating or doing X, Y or Z). I also think that microincidents can start to add up to a pattern of social degeneracy in Latvia.

Let me just name a few. In two drives to and from my summer house (finally closing up and wired with burglar alarms), I saw several instances of what I called "traffic wading" -- persons simply, blindly stepping into a street wherever the fancy strikes them, then standing more or less dumbstruck on the white line or just zombieshambling along, since cars do stop for pedestrians and other large objects on the road, even in Latvia. One woman I saw was standing and smoking on a busy road. Most of those I saw were not drunk (the 9 am stumblebums encountered as I walk to work no longer register). They were just somehow --detached.

Then there was the a middle-aged female undead with huge shopping bags who, in a very narrow (and badly designed) place in a cafe in the Alfa Centrs shopping mall, simply squeezed and pushed by us, not saying a word, not giving us a chance to step aside. I remarked to my wife something to the effect that " the bitch could have excused herself" loud enough for the woman to hear, but she simply moved on, zombiefaced and deaf (a Latvian language paper folded in one of her bags seemed to show that she understood the language). This was not the first such encounter, sometimes these robo-bābas (for all you Latvian readers) or robo-bitches (not an exact translation) bump past you at street crossings and other places where there is pedestrian congestion.

What I am saying is that as the better educated and more adventurous (of economic necessity) population emigrates, what is left is an increasingly behaviorally deviant, strange, lumpenized, often intoxicant dependent contingent responsible for an increasing number of microincidents that add up to an emerging sense that society is degenerating as the ranks of an economically deprived or outcast and psychologically damaged underclass seem to increase day by day.

This is not just me. A local Latvian woman who I work with from time to time, and who moves around roughly the same streets as I do also told me recently that she was freaking out from all the strange and bizarre people she was seeing. Is that as the Eloi leave, we see the Morlocks better?

Riga public transport wardens are pigs!

Diena carries a report (in Latvian) by a woman who arrived with a planeload of Italian tourists at Riga Airport. Most of them (young people) took the no. 22 bus to the city center, basically  "the airport bus" . The bus was stopped by a group of public transport wardens (whose job, as in other European cities, is to check for riders without tickets) who stormed aboard, one of them waving a baton, and immediately started terrorizing the Italians, who had not paid (nor been asked to pay when buying tickets from the driver) a fee for larger luggage (n0 such charges, as far as I know, in any civilized country). There was no sign in English explaining this fee. The Italians were threatened with a 15 LVL fee (around USD 30) on their first day in Latvia.

Comments to the Diena piece indicate that this kind of barbaric, piggish scum also work on other parts of the public transport in Riga. The next time there is disorder in this city, perhaps the offices of Rīgas Satiksme (Riga Public Transport) should earn a few paving stones? :) Or better yet, that passengers throw the pig-wardens off the bus, rather than vice-versa. 

The next time I read that someone has punched out a transport warden, I will not get too upset (OK, chances are, it will be some lowlife fare evader, but what the heck...).