Shot captured 16.01.2012, 00.05. People are chilling around a camp fire on the middle lane of a large down town boulevard. It’s a reassuring site for the photographer: the palace of Justice seems to be on the side of the mob, for now. Prowling the streets with the camera around my neck, I have a story of my own about what happened last night. It all started a year or so ago, with the moves of the government: pay cuts, public humiliation of specific classes, large scale theft and the persistence of characters widely disrespected, such as a short PM and Udrea.
At the time, I classified their actions as acts of vandalism to be followed by the true vandals. As a parenthesis, the ancient law of this land transpired to our times one article in the form of a proverb, something like Y who cultivates rain shall collect storm – but the original Romanian form also in includes a hint about “I told you so!”.
Then some weak public protests that didn’t impress anyone, let alone the media dogs, which I recall openly calling for a revolution on past occasions, to no unveil. Things were gloomy. Poverty and a rich government were climbing, but nothing happened, because the government targets were domains that didn’t work, people don’t like them or they were already half dead, such as education, police or public sanitation. Months passed in the apathy of the Romanians.
The perfect scene for a bunch of fellows who just like to fight. They get a special kind of high from a fight and a triple dose from a street fight. I have a list of reasons to like them. I’m not defending them. I just know them and their current PR distorted their image. Some of them will hire legal assistants to face their destruction charges. Some are too poorly educated to even know there’s free legal representation in Romania, if you can’t afford a lawyer. Some are uber-educated people that traveled hundreds of kilometers, infiltrated amongst the peaceful protesting crowd for long cold hours, studied tens of police enforcers and looked them in the eye without a mask, then caught a moment off-guard and threw a rock to put the cop down. He didn’t go through all that trouble to injure. If he heard there were 1000 jandarmi at km. 35, in the middle of the field on the highway, he would be there to smack one of the cops. These guys can not be stopped by any enforcement system. Then there’s the Ultra’s, the Mad Dogs, the Yellow dogs, the Red Dogs, the New Right, the guys from Pantelimon, and the countless Fight Clubs with different names and creeds scattered throughout the country. All these guys were feeling humiliated, beaten at their own game, watching extreme vandalism in the Romanian politics and not having a piece of the action. They were laying idle, waiting for a crowd to spark the barrel of gunpowder. Then, last night, they put on a show about Romanian protests. The message was: you can fuck with the masses for a long time but there’s a tiny chance that it will turn into a bad day in Bosnia.
It’s true that the collective intellect of the masses is much lower then that of any individual, but the corrupted political class has lowered the level of intellectual insulting to such a standard that the only agreeable course of action was to beat the crap out of somebody representing the government.
