On emigration and the Riga fundraising ban

A couple of events coincided and made me want to write something about the state of society in Latvia. The latest demographic statistics show that Latvia has lost some 340 000 inhabitants in the past 12 years, of which more than 211 000 emigrated and some 128 000 represented “negative natural increase”, a bizarre way of saying that, in fact, the Latvian population is slowly dying out.

Last year 30 380 persons, most of them of prime working age (including more than 4 000 children) left the country to move abroad more or less permanently. Net migration was just over 23 000, since some 7 000 immigrants (or repatriated emigrants) arrived in Latvia. Nonetheless, the emigration statistics show that precisely the part of the population that should be having children in Latvia and diminishing “negative natural increase” is the one that is leaving the country. As a total percentage of a population of perhaps two million, 30 000 may not sound like much (even though it is equal to all of Rēzekne packing up and leaving), but it is a larger percentage of the productive and fertile segment of the population – call it the life blood of a nation.

Why is Latvia bleeding out? I have discussed the issue before – and the reason is a complex set of circumstance that, at the end of the day, tell the mobile and ambitious part of the population that nothing is likely to change in the deep governance of society in the foreseeable future. By deep governance, I mean not only the behavior of government, but also the ability of society to self-organize and the way it has done so hitherto. In short, Latvia has failed to launch from being a wounded post-soviet society to becoming a modern, self-confident, educated democratic community.

The stubborn death of trust

Community requires trust and there has been little in the track record of those running Latvia to cause any trust in institutions (polls show that there has only been a slight bounce-back from levels of trust in socio-political institutions that could only be called a kind of pernicious anarchism). Meanwhile, as I believe I have written before, Latvia’s joining the European Union, coupled with cheap airlines and the capability of rich and frequent communication via the internet, have led to hundreds of thousands of Latvians exercising their choice of governance by emigrating, but still retaining physical and virtual ties with friends and family in the “fatherland”.

Indeed, some recent videos I saw of Latvians celebrating the midsummer Jāņi festival in the United Kingdom were eerily like my childhood as a child of political emigres in the US. Back in the 50s, Latvians in the Boston area who had been in the US for about as many years (4 or 5) as those working in the UK  celebrated Jāņi by gathering at a farmstead with a large field and arriving, often, in the first cars they had bought once settled in. The videos of Latvians gathering at a rented farm field somewhere in the UK were almost the same thing – just some of the vans and cars looked like prosperity had come a bit more quickly to the Brit-Lats. And like my parents generation in the 1950s, they were young families with kids and an aura around them that, henceforth, this is what “being Latvian” will have to be. Unlike in the 1950s and 1960s, when Latvia was a Soviet occupied country, visits to Latvia from the UK or Ireland are no problem at all, which does not change the fact that these people are starting to form semi-permanent communities in their countries of emigration.

The easy growth of emigration 2.0

The interesting thing about the communities that formed in the post-war exile was that they could not really grow by adding new members from Latvia and many of them, due to processes of assimilation and aging, are at a tipping point of starting the slide toward extinction of their identities (the people aren’t going anywhere, there will be fourth and fifth generation kids with “strange”  names and some inkling of why). The new emigrant communities are being fed by a constant flow of new arrivals from Latvia, giving them a different dynamic that the handful of 90-somethings gathering to celebrate 65 years of the Pigbridge Latvian Welfare Society (Pigbridža was a fictitious American town with a big Latvian community that came up in some satirical Latvian emigre writing).

Fundraisers will always be among us

As to what is happening back in Latvia , the Riga City Council has banned individual and small-scale fundraising starting August 1. There was a noticeable drop in the number of fundraisers around the Riga Central Station, a favorite gathering place for both mendicants and moochers, with the latter taking the upper hand. The daily dog encampment, grown to three animals and a variable crew of up to three misery marketers, was gone. Hippety-Hop, the young otherwise able-bodied below-the-knee amputee has not been seen for a while. One pathetic looking old lady (a station-area regular) was seen talking with her handlers...er..marketing consultants, but not actively soliciting donations. The municipal police have been firmly herding the fundraisers away, but only to have them return once backs are turned.

This is an insoluable problem and probably a waste of police time and legislative effort, since fundraisers would not be doing their job if they were had the means to pay fines and for the true supplicants, jail (showers, food, a bed) could be a blessing. The fundraisers who are backed by a crew (who can enforce getting their cut far better than the police can enforce a fine) will be temporarily harassed and scattered, as well they should be, but there the core crime isn’t fundraising (which really shouldn’t be a crime), but rather a domestic form of human trafficking. Here, I would be perfectly comfortable with some knees getting busted (but not the ones bent in supplication, rather, the knees and heads of those emptying the mendicant’s cup at the end of the day). Aggresive fundraising should also be punishable – two stern refusals by the prospect and the fundraiser/moocher deserves a kick in the teeth.

Broadly speaking, the fundraising is one minor symptom of the failure of Latvia to launch and of the discrepancy between macro-economic statistics and street-level reality (against the background of ongoing emigration). Beggary, to finally call it by its politically incorrect name, will always be with us in every kind of society or social order, if only because there is a small percentage of humanity who simply blow off the open cars  as the train of history races on, and they cannot be gathered back.

Finally, I have seen the macro argument made by Edward Lucas that Eastern Europe should be dropped as a description or a concept, and most of his arguments are...logical. So why, in defiance of that logic, do I see Eastern Europe every day here in some aspect of Latvian life. More on that in later posts...

What will happen to "fundraiser" Hippety-Hop?

Fundraisers (why say beggars? Same thing.) around Riga's Central Station are nothing new. You get to know them by sight after a while. There is the cat and dog colony kept by one or more bums at the entrance to what I call the “Stockmann tunnel” (which leads from the Central Station square to the Stockmann department store and the Forum Cinemas multiplex). Also on the steps are an old woman sitting impassively and another woman who suffers from some neuromuscular disorder. Standing by Riga's and some say, northern Europe's busiest pedestrian crossing are a number of amputees, one with a crutch, the others double amputees in wheelchairs. There have been a number of “bum fights” between the man with the crutch and at least one of the guys in a wheelchair. Apparently there are territorial issues. The shouting during the fights is in Russian.

One of the most intriguing characters is a relatively young man (20s) on crutches with a a below-the-knee amputation, who I will call Hippety-Hop, because, until recently, he was a very forward and aggressive fundraiser, actually going out in traffic and hopping up to stopped cars to solicit alms. He also spends hours standing at one or the other of his favored positions (one is at the steps leading down to the Stockmann tunnel). Hippety-Hop can be there for hours, standing. Street-level fundraising is a full time job for him, as it is for many of the others. But given Hippety-Hop's stamina and vigor (until recently), one wonders what exactly happened to the man and why he is doing what he does – hopping around and plaintively fund-raising in Russian (or so I suppose). I saw him last summer when he was almost exclusively working the traffic lights and stopped cars.

Losing part of a leg is a major trauma, but it cannot compare to the disfigurement and degradation of the double amputees or the alcohol-ravaged bums. Why was Hippety-Hop, whatever his level of education, not offered some kind of rehabilitation and work? If the dude can stand for hours or hop around on his crutches, why not do factory work, if not in Latvia, then Ireland or the UK? Most European countries have programs to put the lightly (and in some cases, even the most severely physically handicapped) to work. In a call center, no one knows how many legs you have.

I don't think Hippety Hop has the language skills for this kind of work. Lately, it seems, he is on the downslope. His face shows signs of what I suspect is drug abuse. My guess is heroin, I have seen him in what seems to be a “nod”, eyes closed, impassive, face looking more ravaged than ever before. Last summer, when fundraising among the cars waiting for then lights to change there was even a vigor to his hop-step and an earnest look on his face as he almost demanded something from the drivers. Now it looks like the dude is down and out.

It looks like there may never have been a chance for Hippety-Hop to get back into a normal life after losing part of his leg, neither through the efforts of Latvia's rock-bottom impoverished social welfare system, nor through assistance from charities or non-governmental organizations. Of course, I don't know the full story, or, for that matter, any story about Hippety-Hop. For all I know, his injury may have been the result of recklessness, part of a stupid, risk-taking lifestyle.

Certainly heroin is not a good choice. Latvia doesn't, as far as I know, have open, non-judgmental needle exchange or methadone programs (I don't know because I don't hang around with any junkies). So every time Hippety-Hop snorts or shoots up, he risks overdosing, or, if using the needle , HIV or hepatitis.

Will Hippety-Hop last out the summer? Who knows? Ironically, he may go down before his fellow fundraisers, the bums wallowing in the dog and cat colony, the old lady, the woman with the neuromuscular thing, even the double amputees and bumfighters. I know almost nothing about social work, but at least some months ago, it may possibly have pulled Hippety-Hop off the street and out of this particular form of fundraising.

Urban cattle and swooping bikes are back!

It's spring and they are back, or have been back for a while – the urban cattle and bike-riders. The former are clogging the sidewalks again, shambling along in small bunches, wandering into traffic, gathering in pedestrian bottleneck and making them worse, or creating bottlenecks where there were none before.

The bike-riders are out in great numbers, often a danger to the urban cattle (they swerve around them), to other pedestrians (zooming by at high speed, no warning) and to themselves (few helmets, bells, reflectors or lights after dark)

Don't get me wrong, I understand the need to ride a bike – it is cheaper than public transport, much cheaper than driving, good for physical fitness, the (urban) environment, etc.etc. All that is correct and I have friends and workmates who ride bikes. But I also see bike-riders in Riga as a hazard. There is no bike-riding culture, one could almost say that Latvia lacks both the infrastructure (bike paths) and the level of civilization to have the same level of urban biking as in Copehagen or Stockholm. Maybe in 25 or 50 years, but not now.

As for urban cattle, they are everywhere, almost a universal phenomenon. There were some in London, shambling along as one tries to purposefully go somewhere. In Stockholm, as I may have written before, the local urban cattle specialize in what I call “ stand and stare” – gathering where others want to pass and simply staring into space or at some signage that normal, conscious people can read in seconds and move on. Tourists are often behaviorally indistinguishable from the local urban cattle, but then again, being a tourist is being – urban cattle in foreign city, moving about in small herds, aimlessly, though not always wandering into traffic or boorishly blocking the movement of those walking with purpose as the local cattle do.

I bear no ill will toward bike-riders as a whole, though I sometimes wish a evil fate on those who narrowly miss me at high speed. There is no reason to zoom down a sidewalk at 40 Kph. However, it seems few urban riders are injured or worse. Most fatal bike accidents occur in the countryside, it seems – shitfaced motorist takes out equally shit-face bike rider, riding as if in the middle of a wartime blackout (no lights, no reflectors, no helmet).

So one faces another summer of trying to walk from point A to point B, getting past or through clumps of urban cattle heading for a point best designated by an imaginary number, and glancing over one's shoulder to see if any bikes are swooping down. Enjoy, I suppose...

Latvia: A drab, grey nation in midwinter

I am writing these recent impressions of Latvia while visiting the US East Coast (the Boston area). While life is no picnic here at all, there are “shiny happy people” around instead of what I saw just before departing. I will be going back to the drab, gray nation on Friday.

One of the things I have been doing as a hobby is to walk around Riga and photograph people, buildings, street scenes and the like. A place I have gone a couple of times with my camera is the Riga Central Market, with its former Zeppelin hangar halls and open-air area. To get there, one way is to go through the Central Station, which has partly been turned into a multi-level shopping center with clothing stores, electronics shops, restaurants, newsstands and a supermarket.

To go from this modern 20^th or even 21^st century environment (shops selling iPads etc.) into the Central Market is a remarkable and depressing transition in terms of the people one encounters. It is a socio-economic leap to another world of mostly old, haggard, grey, apathetic and resigned faces and bodies. Listless, old, greyish-pale expressionless or ravaged faces abound, almost like a contingent of people shuffling away from some disaster just around the corner or over the horizon, too burned out to move very fast. Is this the Third World, the photos of Somali or Ethiopian war victim and refugee faces, only white and better nourished?

The impression one gets is of a society from which the life-spark has vanished, or more precisely, emigrated. There is only a scattering of young people in the otherwise old and worn masses shuffling about the market with tattered plastic bags (almost like the Soviet era, except that then plastic bags were a sign of privilege, net bags and cloth abounded). The young are tourists or shoppers seeking fresh, organically grown vegetables and other foods from the countryside. The sellers, too, for the most part are babushka type country women, with a bit higher energy level than their often morose shoppers.

I fear this somehow illustrates the state and fate of the Latvian nation (including non-Latvians, too). Drab, haggard, impoverished, drained of any hope for the future and of an age when, given the overall demographics and state of health care, there probably is little time left for many of the individuals one encounters. All this just a few hundred meters from the modern center of Riga, where tourists and somewhat better looking locals gather, as well as the significant but visibly dwindling young, who are often livelier and happier.

What is going on? As a colleague working for a foreign news agency said, it appears that the local Latvian media don't really care. Poverty and long-term unemployment statistics are big news in many other countries. A shift in the number of poor generates considerable media attention, analyses, searches for root causes and the like. Not in Latvia. Even the annual Human Development report seems to focus on issues of identity and emigration/immigration (to be honest, I have only skimmed parts of the document).

It would be facile to say that the root of all this is the transition to a capitalist market economy. There were similar scenes in the Central Market of huddled, grey masses of socialist citizens waiting in huge lines (sometimes crowds bordering on mobs) for a piece of gray frozen meat to be hacked off a huge block with an axe. One of the roots of the seeming exhaustion and demoralization of Latvia's people is fifty years of occupation and a totalitarian, centrally planned economy that did provide a dull, monotonous subsistence for most people living under the system. It was the era of stagnation, shortages and little apparent hope that anything would change, though with a certain reliability that rents would be low, electricity cheap, bread, fish, potatoes and other basic foods generally available and the occasional sausage or fruit waiting at the end of a long queue if you were lucky. Being a victim was nothing new to Latvians leaving socialism and entering the new system of the 1990s.

The problem was that the new “system” in the 1990s consisted of most of the ex-Communist elite of an entire country trying to imitate the behavior and lifestyle of characters on the American TV show Dallas, since this best approximated what they had been taught about capitalism. The idea was to immediately spend money – the more, the better – on huge houses and big cars. Dishonesty and cheating – whether on wives or business partners – was part of the deal.

To be sure, stuff like that happened in the real world, so that the picture of how things were in non-socialist economies as presented by Dallas was selective, but not entirely inaccurate. There was no show made called Central Committee, which could have shown the depravity (now documented) of the Communist elite running a state-owned, planned socialist economy and succeeding poorly, sometimes pointlessly and often sloppily at providing what are still the promises of socialist movements everywhere – free healthcare, free education, and full employment.

It is obvious that a grab-whatever-you-can economy will generate inequality, or rather, exaggerate existing inequalities among a population that had been indoctrinated that complete equality was possible and that, indeed, a semblance of it existed in the low, but barely adequate standard of living shared by most of the population. Among the old and hopeless, memories of this have turned to nostalgia for “better times” under the old system.

Why is Latvia turning into a society with a significant, even dominant population of the aging, passive and helpless poor? Some would say that the cause of poverty is the failure to equally distribute wealth, bringing us back to the socialist argument that all one needs is a centralized system for equally distributing resources in a planned way. This works, more or less, in organizations that are smaller and somewhat less complex than society as a whole. The best example, in rough and general terms, is the military. All soldiers have more or less the same uniforms, weapons, food and medical support and can be relied upon, as a whole, to carry out centrally issued orders and instructions. The military is, looked at this way, an organization that produces the outcomes for its members that are promised by socialism – equality in the fulfillment of all basic needs by central planning and allocation.

However, it can also be argued that the root cause of poverty is low productivity. Here the military analogy breaks down, because functionally “socialist” armies do not produce what they consume. They are not, strictly speaking, “economies”, and it is economic systems that create wealth, multiply and refine resources. Latvia's poverty stems in part from a failure to form an economic system that increases its own productivity and, thereby, the wealth available for “redistribution”, should anyone choose to do so.

Productive and evolving economic systems also need strong institutions that ensure the rule of law, the enforcement of contract and the orderly elimination of non-productive economic entities in favor of those that are innovative and more productive. With all their imperfections and failings, Western European countries have created such economic systems based largely on private ownership and market relations among economic actors.

Since the early 1990s, Latvia has had a long parade of advice and instruction on how to reform and transition society from a failing socialist economy to a modern market system, including the necessary institutions to underpin such an economic system. To be sure, a lot of the advice given to Latvia over the past 20+ years has been condescending, oversimplified, overoptimistic, and presented with little understanding of how the presumed audience – homo (post)sovieticus saw the world. But at the end of the day, or rather, the two decades, Latvia was given almost all of the basic and much of the sophisticated knowledge on reforming its society that was needed to build a socio-economic system that would increase productivity and increase the total wealth of society.

So it can be said that much of the poverty in Latvia, exacerbated by the emigration of productive and potentially productive individuals, was caused by a failure of politicians and institutions and, to some extent, society as a whole, to learn the lessons repeatedly given to them since 1991. They can be summed up as – don't bribe, don't steal, deal honestly, pay fairly, invest for the mid-to-long term, educate your workforce, streamline government, make bureaucracy small, smart and efficient, make the benefits of tax-paying visible and obvious, keeping taxes moderate, etc. etc.

Too little of this has been done. Instead, the political elite has discredited itself to an extent unheard of since modern polling methods have been used. The collapse of trust in institutions in Latvia is very likely irreversible and has already mutated into a kind of social paranoia as witnessed by the run on Swedbank. The end result is that we have a society that, at least by street-level observation, is ravaged by poverty and has failed to implement the practices that would have significantly reduced that poverty. It is too late to retrain the older part of the population to do the work, say, of five Chinese while getting paid three times Chinese wages (probably a bad comparison), and the young are making decisions every day to leave a country they perceive as failing and futureless. The drab, gray, haggard, exhausted, aged population that one sees behind the socio-economic divide of the Riga Central Station (and probably in many rural areas) is the result of a series of choices over the past 20 years that, whether intentional or simply clueless, have resulted in an act of “futuricide” agains the Latvian nation.

The “nicotine drill”, urban cattle update and a whiff of heroin

I go to work past some kind of vocational high school in Riga, and almost every morning, I see something that reminds me of my high school days in the US-- almost everyone has left the building and is standing around in small to medium-sized groups. Back at Newton North High, this kind of a scene meant there was a fire drill, and this occurred a couple of times during any semester. At the Latvian school, the teenagers are out, standing in clumps, every weekday. And 99% of them are smoking. It is, in other words, a daily “nicotine drill”.

Don't get me wrong. Smoking is an individual choice. I have smoked for periods in my life, but never to the point of addiction (“needing” a cigarette at all costs, feeling “withdrawal” symptoms). If someone wants to smoke, let them do it (with respect for others and non-smokers, a commodity in short supply in Latvia). But the shocking number of smoking teenagers every morning indicates a number of things badly wrong. First, apparently these kids are either not educated about smoking, or whatever they are told falls on deaf ears. Compare this to the relatively low teen smoking rates in Sweden and other European countries. The other thing is that these smokers are the public health problems of the future in a country were there is practically no public health – by the time they are 20 years older, there may well be no tax-funded health care in Latvia (or many of them may be net consumers of health service in countries they have emigrated to).

In other words, the “nicotine drill” is yet another “street level” observation of the failure of societal mechanisms in Latvia and the continued degeneration of everyday life. I can only note that the proportion of the strange, addled and desperate-looking on the streets continues to increase. It is, perhaps, distorted by the fact that I work near the Riga central train station, and train stations are magnets for social outcasts.

Just a few examples – the pathetic, stereotype-boosting hustle by Roma/Gypsies by the train station, involving a few women peddling some kind of cosmetics, supervised by a number of men. It happens every day, with little apparent success by the “salesladies”. Where the goods come from can also be open to question. Certainly, one of the marketing mistakes by this team of street peddlers is that most Latvians automatically think – “Roma=stolen goods”. This may or may not be true. Perhaps they are peddling counterfeit goods. In any case, this activity, day-to-day, propagates the image of Roma as folks who engage in what can charitably be called cheap-ass, sleazy commerce.

A few meters away (one standing with a crutch, one sitting in his wheelchair) are two disabled beggars, who routinely engage in verbal and, sometimes, physical bum fights. The stand right by the pedestrian cross toward the train station (also the Origo shopping center) said to be the busiest in northern Europe. Here we see the phenomenon I have called urban cattle in full flower. Urban cattle are people who simply wander about mindlessly, ignorant of distinctions between sidewalks and road traffic, as well as anyone else engaged in locomotion (on foot, by motor vehicle or bike) around then. Urban cattle operate alone or in small herds. These herds, as a rule, fan out when one approaches and tries to overtake and pass them while walking somewhere in a purposeful manner (the cattle saunter and pause, doing “stop and stares” at nothing in particular).

It has now become routine at the Origo crossing, where pedestrian lights are indicated by digital times, for the urban cattle to jump the gun in considerable numbers at around 10 seconds before the lights actually change. I see this every time I cross there. First the urban cattle, some as early as minus 15, without even breaking stride from whatever hallucinatory or somnambulant hike they are one, then the rest of us

This seems especially dangerous, as the cattle end up in the path of drivers racing past the crossing on yellow. So far, I have not seen anyone hit, which seems almost miraculous. Then one day I noticed a few heavy-eyed cattle walking in a noddy-plodding manner not typical of alcohol drunks, who usually stagger and sometimes are self-aware (with the exception of the glassy-eyed robodrunks marching in their own oblivion).

Which brings us to the next observation. Mr H is definitely here in Riga. Harry the Horse is riding high. People are fucked up on heroin in Riga, not in great numbers, but increasingly noticeable. I have worked or lived in places with junkies on the streets before (New York, Frankfurt) and the eyes half-shrouded by lids, knees bending slowly, then popping back out of the nod thing is pretty obvious. Maybe other recreational chemicals do the same. I don't remember seeing folks on quaaludes back in the day, but those made people who took them into giggly-gumbies (like the stop-motion clay creature Gumby of 1950s and 1960s TV), or so it is said.

Anyway, I run across a few obvious junkies on the street every week, and this should have alerted the media that something is going on. But the Latvian media do not have the time or resources to deal with this issue, or maybe I don't read the right papers. However, it is become clear that heroin use among the underclass (and not only) is an emerging problem in this country.

My solution – decriminalize heroin, set up needle exchanges, clean shooting galleries and offer detox programs (unrealistic in Latvia except with charitable financing) to those who need it. This would reduce the danger of overdoses, get the heroin trade out of the hands of criminals (shifting it to pharmacies for registered addicts), prevent the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, as well as drastically reduce crime related to drug addiction (theft and robberies) as well as emptying the prisons of those “guilty” of victimless crime. 

20 years of freedom – and?

OK, I will join the great chorus in saying how great it is that Latvia regained its independence in 1991 and nothing could have been worse that continuing to stagnate under the Soviets. The Soviet occupation was a truly horrible time, especially the beginning of it all, with deportations, war, deportations again and repression and fear that only eased very gradually toward the end of the 1980s. Add to that the bizarre economic deprivation, queues, shoddy products, blat-level corruption, dismal everyday life with little or nothing changed, no freedom to travel, etc. etc.

The occupation left indelible marks on the Latvian nation, and those are the reason that, at the end of the day, we are happy to have our freedom, we say we cherish our freedom (and we probably do), and we should never, never lose that freedom again. Of course!

But what have we made of that freedom? What did those of us who lived outside Latvia expect? We grew up as “refugee/emigres” wherever we were, a status that kept important, vital parts of our lives focussed on Latvia and on the impossible dream of Latvian independence. The dream came true, but we who grew up in freedom knew that freedom was the most important kind of opportunity, often the first step. Freedom is to be used, filled out with a vision, a path chosen together with other free citizens.

Yes, Latvia used its freedom. The country made its way into the European Union and NATO, two visions that it automatically adopted once free. But after that? There is no realistic, coherent vision for the future.

To be frank, Latvia achieved freedom from the Soviet Union, but is still far from free from being a nation of far too many homo post-sovieticus. It has lost up to 300 000 inhabitants to emigration, a good part of them, perhaps, for largely economic reasons, but also because what the political and economic elite of this country has done and failed to do has broken any trust they had in the government and any faith in the future.

I put myself among those who have lost this trust and faith – for reasons that I have argued many times over in this blog. Latvia could have done a lot better with its freedom over the last 20 years by making many choices not made. Many of these choice not taken involved actions and changes of behavior that would have cost very little money. It is not case of failing to do as old rich countries did with their wealth, but failing, with few exceptions, to behave as old rich countries did in order to become both rich and reasonably civilized.

Much of this I have described in earlier posts. There is really nothing new to say on the 20^th anniversary of the Soviet coup and independence. I don't regret spending much of my life growing up in the US, living and working in Germany and Sweden, while always trying to “be Latvian” and do things for “the Latvian cause”, even as a journalist. I can say, too, that I have also “served my time” here in Latvia, for better or for worse. We have what we have. Been there, done that, yet again. But I've had enough, too, in one sense. I want to be somewhere else and do something else next, before going even further into “advanced youth” where my options will shrink.

Urban Cattle II - more observations

“Urban cattle”. the phrase I coined, was accepted by the Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com). I submitted it because it amused a friend from back in the day, now safely living in California, but never been to Latvia, nor even Latvian. Is the dictionary listing the reason they seem to be propagating, increasing in numbers here in Riga? 

They were out in force on the weekend, along a major thoroughfare, Brīvības, which is a very wide boulevard for most of its length. Probably, therefore, a great place for urban cattle to wander out, stand on the white center line, oblivious to traffic or to meander across perhaps 50 meters from a legitimate pedestrian crossing.

At real pedestrian crossings, such as the one by the Riga Central Station, said to be the busiest in the Baltic area, the urban cattle mingle with the ordinary pedestrians, who watch and wait for a countdown indicator. For this subspecies of nimble urban cattle, any number below minus 10 is a signal to jump the curb. With red-light running a very commonplace event, never mind racing on yellow, it is a wonder that I haven’t seen any urban cattle taken out.

The nimble ones, I have noticed, are young and usually look spaced on some cocktail of addictive substances. With a loping gait and eyes watching some chemical cartoon version of the reality around them, they set off, oblivious to blaring horns as cars swerve around them. I mean, Lonja the urla or his Latvian counterpart (can’t tell cause the cattle don’t speak very much) are on the move, the deck is rolling and it is another day of solvent sniffarama or whatever they are into.

Then there is old Zonko the geezer, who crosses and wades into a line of cars, so that he is hidden from the next lane, where folks aiming to do a right turn only can’t see him. Surprise!

Further out of town, we see Dancin’ Dan, who is traipsing, fucked up on rotgut, along the center line, waving at some cars, shit eating grin on his face. I still wait for the return of Meatface the mobile phone man, but maybe he has been taken out, though hitting him with a vehicle would do as much damage as whacking a real, and not so small cow. Not recommended.

Somewhere closer to the Alfa shopping mall, the airhead teeny boppers start appearing, also traipsing or teetering on the white center line, but unlike Dan, sober and stupid as a fencepost as Latvians would say. Favorite meandering area for these urban cattle is also within sight of an elevated walkway where you can cross the street any time you want. 

Then there are the tourist cattle, more often than not Swedish, lumbering along the sidewalk or crossing the street with technical correctness, but unaware that this is not fucking Stockholm, folks. They don’t stop -- the cars. Maybe they swerve,  they may honk and if old sheep-brained Sven and his wife notice, they will live another day with no casts, no crutches. 

Back on the sidewalk, the bikes are out in numbers, to them, pedestrians are just slalom poles to be weaved around at high speed. To the bikies, we are all urban cattle. 

Able-bodied beggars, urban cattle and the assless anorexic

Every day, I keep seeing strange and stranger stuff here in Riga at the ill-defined but somehow "street level" of observation. Most of it points to this society continuing to slither into further disintegration and degeneracy.
Let's start with the beggars. They have been around for a while, they are a symptom of both socio-economic and personal problems. They exist, to some degree, everywhere. You get used to most of them around the central station in Riga (railroad stations attract the wacked-out and weird everywhere). The two one-legged dudes, one on crutches, the other in a wheelchair, prone to periodic bum-fights. The various dudes, so clueless about misery marketing as to wallow in one of the pedestrian tunnels with one or more dogs.
Don't get me wrong, the wretched (who are such for whatever reason) certainly deserve at least the companionship of a dog. Dogs seldom propose getting drunk or shooting heroin, so they may even be better companions than the kinds of pals one acquires by persistently being in lumpenproletarian circles. But for fuck's sake, don't bring the dog out to beg with you because it clearly says that any alms will be split with a)the seller of rotgut (krutka), for drugs (that should be decriminalized and available at maintenance clinics), for some kind of food, and for the dog??!!
But what disturbs me more is that there are able bodied beggars not showing many, sometimes even no outward signs of addiction, misery and depredation. These guys should quit begging when they have enough to buy a Ryanair ticket to the UK or Germany, where they might be able to find work.
One beggar stood out -- a young, cleanly-dressed woman (early or mid-twenties), showing none of the signs of decline of the other young women who claim to beg for their children. What is worrisome that she looks able-bodied in another sense, that is, potentially approachable by people wanting to buy sex. In other words, she is potentially one step from prostitution (which, with some qualms, should be legalized) and the risk of being trafficked. Why doesn't she simply get the hell out of here before some else arranges to have her taken to elsewhere in Europe.
Now to urban cattle. I am not talking about the urban cattle of India that one sees simply moving about cities in traffic, standing, wandering, stopping and flicking the flies with their tails (or so one sees them in TV documentaries). Maybe I am wrong, but the idea of cattle to me means --dumb. The urban cattle I see day to day in the streets of Riga are the folks blithely, cluelessly wandering into traffic, doing the most outrageous things.
Take one guy. He is standing halfway in a traffic lane.  I am driving and slow down, gesture for him to cross. But what does Zork the Zombie do? Nothing. I drive around him and shout something like cross, for fuck's sake! (pises pāri! in Latvian). But there are more bizarre things ahead. I spot a guy standing on the white line in the middle of a major street (Avotu). This is a favorite grazing area for urban cattle who simply go out there and then dumbly watch the traffic, hoping to cross when the fancy strikes them.  Is he one of them?
No, the dude, lets call him Meatface, is standing and talking on his mobile phone. OK... We drive on to a place nearby to look at a used office chair. This means -- park, climb five flights of stairs, talk to the seller, determine that the chair is not for us, politely say goodbye, walk back to car and drive back to the paid parking lot where we keep it passing the corner of Avots and Lācplēša and what do we see-- Meatface is still standing in the middle of the street, talking on the phone. WTF?
Then there are the more nimble cattle, the darters, who dash blindly into the path of traffic in one of those gaps in the flow of cars. Cars do slow and sometimes stop, so the darting cattle are not often removed from the gene pool.
Urban cattle, to be sure, are not a Latvian phenomenon. My "favorites" in Stockholm, on the subway system are the ones who wander up to the top or bottom of an escalator and simply stand and stare. Stå och stirrare - stand and starers, they could be called in Swedish. Simply unable to unfuck themselves and made a decision -- Down or Not Down (the strange Swedish way of labeling escalators Ned and Ej ned).
An so to the the assless anorexic. She was walking ahead of me in one of the pedestrian tunnels, like a large, ultrathin Barbie doll come to life. Instead of legs, she seemed to be walking on thin, flesh-colored stilts. No hints of any body under her skirt, where the stilts disappear. Assless.
Anorexia, like anywhere, is a problem in Latvia, little talked about with probably no medical and psychological resources to deal with it. It is a first-world ailment, Latvia is moving toward being its own version of third-world lite. 

Narcotic summer effect and a two-wheeled jolt to reality

This is the time of year when Latvia, indeed, the entire Baltic-Nordic area blossoms into summer with long bright evenings and never-quite dark nights. The Midsummer or Jāņi festival is the pinnacle of "Latvianness" with its Līgo songs, beer, traditional cheese, bonfires and celebration. Everything looks rosy and this year, there was a long holiday weekend of four days to take a break from work.
With the sunny streets filled with tourists and the often glum population looking a little better, the summer in Riga can have a kind of narcotic effect, exaggerating the things that are good about life here and putting the deep, fundamental crises in the economy, politics and society in the background.
This evening I was shocked out of the mild euphoria when, while crossing at a green light (for pedestrians) on a one-way street, a burly man on a bike whizzed by narrowly missing me and turning into the street in the wrong direction.  I was so startled that I yelled after him the Latvian equivalent of "watch where you are going, motherfucker!" (Skaties kur brauc, mauka! -- the English translation expresses the emotional gist and is not literal). Anyway, the dude actually circled around to mutter something at me, but that was the end of it.
I have written about reckless cycling earlier and how it brings out a lot of contradictions. On the one hand, bike riding is "green" and makes economic sense for those who don't want to pay upkeep on a car or public transport fares.  A number of my work colleagues ride bikes and I would never wish them ill. I  may have earlier written (after some near misses by two-wheeled assholes racing and weaving down sidewalks) that I regard news of bike riders being knocked down by cars as "one less" (temporarily or permanently). That is a bit harsh, and the irony is that the urban bike cowboys usually aren't the ones who get taken out by motorists, they are usually someone out in the country, alone on a dark dirt road who gets mowed down by the local shit-faced (lopā for my Latvian readers) country boozehound weaving down the road in a car.
There has been a campaign to alert drivers to the increasing numbers of bike riders and their "invisibility", but I would not risk anyone's life on the assumption a series of TV ads will change the generally savage (though less than some years ago) attitude of Latvian drivers. In any event, there is really no place for bike riders. There are few bike paths and the riders forced on to the sidewalk by traffic probably have no choice. They do have a choice about their speed and the possibility to use a warning bell to indicate they are approaching to pedestrians.  Unfortunately Riga is not, in terms of infrastructure and societal behavior, nor will it be for decades, anything like Copenhagen or Amsterdam or even Stockholm, where there is a civilized order for both motor vehicles and bikes. Bike riders will continue to be a threat to the rest of us and some of the rest of us (in cars  and trucks) will menace those on bikes. The low-intensity conflict will go on, with casualties on both sides.

A political weathervane and a fine, bland little gathering

The first organized public reaction to the dismissal of the Saeima and subsequent “merriment” was a rally called by TV personality Viesturs Dūle and others on an isolated, semi-artificial island in the river Daugava. The idea was to protest against the oligarchs allegedly running Latvian politics and also to “bury the oligarch within each of us”.

The latter part very much put me off from the whole undertaking, because I don't feel a bit like wanting to make a great fortune by skimming tax funds and using other advantages derived from state capture. I have nothing against a great fortune, but please, let it come to me by my own efforts on a law-governed, free market.

If the message was that the citizenry of Latvia is also responsible for the dismal state of politics, then it has nothing to do with any oligarch in any of us. Instead, it is the inability to learn from past mistakes in voting, to hold politicians to their promises (at least the executable promises), and to be ready to organize a democratic, non-parliamentary opposition/resistance movement when one realizes that the whole system here in Latvia is, to put it precisely, fucked.

Aside from that and the fact that the whole event on June 8 can probably be best described by the Slavic-derived Latvian word balagāns, (a kind of cheapo, shallow but still entertaining little carnival), it was a weathervane event, since as many as 8 000 mostly young people gathered to listen to a few speeches and watch a huge wooden symbol of “corruption” set afire. The thought crossed my mind that something like that would have more impact if a real symbol of the oligarchs were burned, like a barn or toolshed belonging to one of them (naturally, harming no physical person, in the spirit of the 1960s German Gewalt gegen Sachen /Violence against objects/ debate within the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition/APO). But we are still a few steps away from something like that, which, for various reasons, I doubt would have any desirable effect.

Anyway, I hope that many of those on the AB Dambis island went away from the event committed to doing something more than just shooing away the oligarch within them and voting on hypothetical and real issues on an internet website. Heck, with a little help from some experts, I (or anyone else) could put up a website where we could vote on the merits of intergalactic flight or anything else. As far as the real oligarchs in Latvia are concerned, I am afraid that they best fit in with a bizarre Facebook event scheduled for exactly 10 days later, on June 18, National I Don't Give A Fuck Day. That is how the powers behind this country's bozo parliamentarians look at public opinion in Latvia, like it or not.

On an everyday basis, the social degeneration continues apace. I had to take a bus to the airport to retrieve the family car, since my wife had flown away to Sweden for a few days and left it in a long-term lot for me to pick up and use over the weekend. The first thing that happened on the good old No. 22 bus was that the traffic wardens or whatever you call them boarded the bus and checked everyone's electronic tickets. Then, knowing almost no English on the one bus route most frequented by foreigners, they hassled an air Baltic pilot (I think he did register his e-ticket) and got a LVL 5 pay-off from him. It was either that or delay his flight to Baku.

Next on board was a shirtless junkie who spent the whole trip up to the next to last stop before the airport nodding (actually bowing at times, almost to the floor) and leaning as he rocked back and forth on a young mother and her kid, or almost bumping into the already fleeced pilot standing across from him. The junkie was joined by two or three criminal looking friends at one of the last few stops before the airport, but then the whole lot proceeded to hop off at a stop in the middle of nowhere just before the airport. To what purpose, I don't know. Driving back in my car, I saw Joe the Junkie waiting for the bus back to town, still in his own quadrant of outer space.

Personally, I think you have to be pretty much a degenerate fuckwit to develop a heroin habit. Politically, I think they should legalize the stuff, register addicts, give them prescriptions, clean needles, shooting areas and decrease the crime rate from addiction related thefts, burglaries and robberies. None of this will happen in Latvia this century...

Another thing brought back to me at the anti-oligarch (but nice, please!) rally was the fact that even Latvians with some sense of purpose are unable to think through any issues that concern them. I don't think I am breaching any confidences by writing about someone who approached me as the rally was breaking up (a man of around 60, roughly my age) and wanted to talk abut some things. The core of it was that he wanted to set up an NGO for Latvian families. So I asked – fine, to what exact purpose? One of things bothering him was that ethnic Latvians had been given fewer opportunities to privatize their apartments than ethnic Russians (post-war migrants) who mainly lived in Soviet-era housing. Many Latvians lived in older buildings that were denationalized.

Assuming we cannot turn back the privatization or denationalization process, I then said that the issue was one of building housing. That didn't move the discussion ahead, as the person believes that there are ex-KGB and Communists everywhere whose specific purpose was to derail any such initiatives. I asked whether, perhaps, the former KGB, if still under control of Russian intelligence, might have other missions under present-day circumstances. Sabotaging initiatives to build housing for Latvian families did not seem to be at the top of the global priority list for anyone running stay-behind networks out of the Kremlin, IMHO. Neither did that move things anywhere.

I then suggested that some people could solve their family housing problems by working abroad, but then the person said that the people he was concerned about didn't even have 5 LVL to buy a cheap Ryanair tickets out of here. Well then, said I, the problem is really extreme poverty, which can have a number of personal and structural causes – lack of education, addiction/alcoholism, lack of jobs, etc. But that also didn't focus things. I am still not sure what this proposed NGO will do, how it will affect anything and how it will define the root problems that it wants society or the government to deal with. There seems to be a total lack of education in problem solving and the critical thought (what are the issues? what are the causes?) needed for it. To be sure, the person was sincere and not really a crackpot (not that public gatherings lack for those). But this is the level of things here. The ones who can get their heads around issues have already done the socio-economic math and are out of here. On that note, please look again at my video CV and spread it around, as I have serious doubts, very serious doubts, about staying on here: http://latviantelecoms.blogspot.com/2011/04/request-for-leads-tips-and-job-offers.html

"Urlasation" -- the path of the future in Latvia?

A method both used and sometimes disparaged in sociology and economics is that of "street level impressions", or what one sees, day-to-day, not using any particular methodology or quantification. It is, to be sure, subjective, but not always useless information.
My street level impression living here in Riga is that society is undergoing visible signs of demographic shift and behavioral degeneration. The number of sullen, boorish, possibly (often probably) abusively intoxicated or just plain disturbingly weird individuals seems (at least proportionately) on the rise. Just yesterday I passed a pasty-faced, glassy-eyed young man who decided to scream incoherently just as we passed each other on the sidewalk. His gait was not that of a typical drunk, more likely the user of an individual combination of recreational chemistry. And this at around 11:30 in the morning. Which is not to say that  9 am, shit-faced drunks aren't a common sight.
The "street" is also getting disturbingly older. I am not simply talking about old people -- I am talking about worn out, haggard, empty-eyed, decrepit looking desperate old folks along side the drug and alcohol addled, white-trashy looking young. The bright and ambitious 20-somethings can still be seen, but I suspect most of them are gone. Many of the teenagers and young loitering on the streets in hoodies and jogging pants are locally called "urlas", a kind of Slavic slang for what I would call lumpenproletarian white trash. Urlas are generally seen as Russian, but there are plenty of ethnic Latvians fitting the category as well.
My view of things is, of course, colored by the fact that I work near the Riga central station, and central railway stations around Europe have a way of attracting the weird, the strange and the underclass.  I think no one can outdo some of the drunken derelicts I have seen near the Helsinki train station nor the junkies that used to hang around near the Frankfurt Bahnhof when my office was next to it.
The begging around the Riga train station is taking on some Third World aspects -- the public display, even flaunting of amputations and other disabilities is commonplace. There is a young man (otherwise able bodied for a desk, service, or sit-down factory job) who stands on crutches displaying his below knee amputation and soliciting alms. Nearby on the steps leading down to a pedestrian tunnel is a woman shaking from some neurological disease and others whose main affliction is alcoholism.
While there is little or nothing that could be done for most of the beggars. one wonders why the young man simply doesn't emigrate. It is also surprising to be approached by young alms-seekers who start the conversation in good English. So emigrate! You have the basic skills.
The depressing thing about these observations is that they point to a clear and almost irreversible social degeneration -- the "urlasation" of the remaining young (or rather, the emigration of most but the urlas) and the pauperization and visible psychological misery of the old and very old. One rarely seems even mildly happy faces among the older population, but quite a few haggard, thousand-yard stares.
Many, maybe even most of the individuals and categories of individuals I have described cannot be strictly "blamed" for being what they are. They are the victims of a collective political and societal failure, after 20 years of independence, to produce conditions where there is reasonably efficient governance and where education has produced productive individuals who can locally be paid at least roughly in line with their productivity. What we have instead is a downward spiraling or, at best, stagnating, demoralized, ill-educated, poorly productive society that has little hope of pulling itself out of its self-made misery in the foreseeable future. 

Popcorn critics overwhelm murder critics after cinema shooting in Riga

At the very end of a showing of the film "Black Swan" Saturday evening, February 19, at the Citadele Cinemas multiplex in Riga, a man was shot and killed by another man. The victim had apparently objected to the shooter's loud munching of popcorn and possibly other noisy behavior. The man who was shot died in the presence of his teenage or possibly younger daughter. The alleged shooter is rumored to have been a graduate student of law, licenced to carry the murder weapon. He was subdued by other moviegoers and taken into custody by police.
The incident has generated hundreds of comments on Latvia's main internet news portals:  apollo.lv, delfi.lv and tvnet.lv. The main theme of these comments was ...popcorn. Not murder, not the batshit alleged murderer, but popcorn eating in movie theaters as a degenerate American habit polluting Latvian cinema culture.
In numerous comments, popcorn eaters are called pigs, hogs, animals and other epithets and the practice of snacking while watching films as a degenerate practice imported from a depraved and degenerate American "subculture". Rather than expressing shock and dismay that a psychopath (who like most moviegoers, likes popcorn) can bring a loaded weapon into a movie theater and fire three shots at someone who scolds him for eating loudly, the commentators (at last look, there were around 750 comments on one of the apollo.lv stories on the shooting) carry on and on about how they are disgusted by popcorn munchers, how it is uncivilized and depraved to eat at the cinema, that only pigs and barnyard creatures do so, etc. etc.
What is amazing about these comments is the ignorance, provincialism and bizarre hypersensitivity of commentators. Calling the US and other western societies with a higher standard of living and quality of life "degenerate" is almost a knee-jerk reaction in the Latvian internet "commentsphere". One only wonders why we are not overrun by refugees from the US and  Western Europe, fleeing the horrors of cinema popcorn and snacks.
In my experience (and I do share a big popcorn with my son when we go to a film), the sound level of most films at Citadele drowns out any munching sounds (people with steel teeth would have to be eating rocks to be noticeably heard above the soundtrack). There are long lines at the popcorn and snack stands on weekend nights, so it seems that most people take snacks to the movies in Riga and don't treat the movie theater like a church or library, which are places of traditional or enforced absolute silence.
Very few commentators look to the real issue -- what was an armed wacko psychopath doing in a crowded theater? What about gun laws and security? Fewer commentators, still address the issue of the weird provincial drivel making up most of the other comments. Not one WTF on this issue...What kind of people and society is this, 20 years after independence, 7 years after joining the European Union? I am sure someone will say that this is typical for internet commentators in Latvia.  That is neither an excuse nor a mere observation, it defines the problem.
And yes, I know,  googling "movie theater shooting" gets a number of results, many of them concerning incidents in the US, which is only more than a hundred times bigger in terms of population than Latvia. 

Ten years after -- almost (an earlier essay)

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A decade of stagnation ahead, looking to Latvia 100

It was the 91st anniversary of Latvian independence on November 18, a day celebrated in somber, but somewhat hopeful circumstances by Latvians outside Latvia for 50 years. For all those years, Latvians mourned the loss of their independence, but held on to hope that the country would regain its freedom. That happened in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Eighteen years have passed since then, and Independence Day is a good time to reflect on what has become of the country since then and what may await Latvia in the next few years. Will country be better off on its 100th anniversary in 2018 than it was on the 90th in 2008 or the 91st this year?

Unfortunately, a detached and rational analysis of what is happening does not leave much room for optimism. Latvia is being devastated by a global economic crisis about which it was repeatedly warned, and for which it failed to prepare (as did, for example, Estonia). Boosted by reckless lending and borrowing, the economy seemed to boom right after Latvia joined the European Union in 2004, and the government, deaf to warnings, spend money as recklessly (pedal to the metal) as some of the Swedish banks sharing the blame for events here.

The government had no plan for what would happen when tax revenues from an artificially overheated economy no longer sufficed to support an inefficient and bloated state administration. A depraved culture of corruption and cronyism flourished almost from " day one" of the renewed independence, but during rapid economic growth, its depredations were not dramatically visible. Now we see the Riga Children' s Hospital plundered (or, perhaps, used as "black treasury" from other corrupt activities) to the tune of LVL 700 000 (more than USD 1.4 million).

Now the country has faced a choice between state bankruptcy or budget cuts that amount to reducing Latvia, with no prior planning or warning, to a minarchy where the state can barely maintain such services as police, national defense, and the courts. By 2012, education, medical care and personal security will largely be services available commercially, not as a result of spending tax revenues. Personal incomes will not increase sufficiently for most Latvians to be able to afford these services on a pay-per-use basis and still pay taxes that will be largely spent to repay the national debt, offering taxpayers practically zero return on taxation.

Another way to express this odd sounding concept is efficient and effective governance. By joining the EU, Latvian citizens have a defacto choice of governance -- that is, they can move to countries that offer a better return on taxation, but less political representation (no or limited voting rights). In Sweden, a Latvian paying taxes only slightly higher than those proposed for 2010 by the Latvian government (with a soon to be zero return), obtains a return in the form of tax-supported (there ain't no such thing as a free anything) education, reasonably efficient tax-supported police, tax-supported medical care and better, less corrupt or simply less dumb-ass public administration.

So what do I see happening? Tens of thousands of Latvians are going to choose places to live with better governance and, probably, better jobs, wages and "general attitude" (a factor often cited by Latvian emigrants to other European countries, mainly Ireland or the UK, who have already realized that the monetary gains of emigration aren't spectacular). Those tens of thousands, perhaps as much as another 100,000 or more, on top of those already living abroad, will drain the labor force of much of its best and brightest workers and potential managers.

When the rest of Europe recovers, Latvia will lack the skilled labor needed to meet export orders from Europe because those who could fill them will already be out there in Europe. The Latvian state has shattered, permanently, any trust or reliance it had among its citizens. This was accomplished by almost two decades of half-assed misgovernance, corruption, idiocy, provincialism, nothing-specialism and pedal-to-the-metalism. It is valid observation, for many Latvians, both the young, who do not want to waste the life ahead for them, and the old, who don't rationally see any change in their lifetimes, that if they (those running the country) haven't gotten it by now (almost 20 years), they probably won't.

So what will we see? A lost decade of third-world-lite economic stagnation, an aging population with a dwindling tax-base to support them, an elite living off of its sleazewealth until even that runs out (but hey, we're OK now, Jack) and their foreign educated children refuse to come back to the backwater their parents created. The best and the brightest of the Latvian nation -- look for them in Dublin, London, Stockholm, Munich, Sydney, San Francisco -- and, if they live in Europe, as most will, dipping into Latvia for relatively cheap home visits on a low-cost airline. The lat, by 2018, will still be the national currency, but hey, it's preferable to pay in euro.

Latvian labor in Latvia will be cheap -- among the cheapest in Europe, but also not very smart or productive. Part of the reason will be that most who finished school after 2010 will have had an education that decreased in quality from year to year and never was that great to begin with. So labor will be rationally cheap -- rated by its quality and productivity. The best value for money will be those kids with Latvian sounding names finishing some of the better schools in Ireland, Britain, Germany or Sweden, and they will be worth the higher going rate as skilled workers or management trainees.

In short, Latvia, thanks to almost depraved misgovernance and a hapless population unable to dislodge its political elite, faces a gloomy and stagnant decade ahead. Yes, one should celebrate independence, but not to the extent of sacrificing rational analysis for feel-good patriotic false optimism.