Inese Dūka

About shame and pride

If only a couple of months ago I was about to say that I sometimes actually am proud of my fellow-countrymen (see the end of the entry of May 5, 2005) then last week it was time to be very ashamed of them… I actually don’t know how much publicity this fact got abroad but I am talking about Riga Pride 2005. I was looking forward to this as I had seen it on the TV in other countries and it usually was a merry happening with lots of interestingly dressed people. The first surprise came when the Riga City Council revoked the permit for the parade using such a dubious argument as mass disturbances. I personally think it was quite a bad judgement from Mr. Škapars side to first allow and then ban the whole thing. Besides – isn’t this exactly the reason why there is the municipal police?... The next step was obvious – this decision was challenged at court. Just a day before the whole thing was supposed to happen the court once again granted the permit to organize the parade. To which the extremist organization responded by saying that they will protest anyway…

Oh well… You can call me naïve but I actually thought that all the protesters would leave it at that – bickering and names-calling. Then you can imagine my (very far from pleasant) surprise when I watched the news on the night of the parade (July 23) and saw that the parades were by far outnumbered by the protesters. The texts they used. They even threw eggs and tomatoes at the policemen and at the paraders’!! And I actually thought that we live in a tolerant society!...

But guess what?! The madness didn’t stop after the parade. The question of allowing the parade almost cost Mr. Škapars (although he personally was against it too…) his job as one of the coalition parties demanded that he steps down from his post. To think that a city manager might actually could loose his job because he did what the law required from him?!... This was the shame part…

But thank goodness other things were happening too. Like the annual Saulkrasti Jazz festival. Kristīne and her friend Mārtiņš were kind enough to take me along to one of the concerts. I won’t go much into reviewing the whole concert as I just wanted to say that here I was pleasantly surprised. After the concert there was a jam session where many young people took part. I was delighted to see how good they were at their young age especially considering that they were Latvians. And it was even more pleasing to see how much they actually enjoyed doing it. This made me even feel a bit sorry that I can’t play any instrument and that my singing-voice isn’t that great because they looked like they have stepped out of the basic framework the society puts you in… All the while looking at all the musicians (of all ages) I was trying to figure out – had they come out of themselves a lot further than most people or did they publicly go far inside themselves…