Streets of Waiting Patient Flags - by Nigel A JAMES
Wanting Flags - Mayday
Impressions - 2012
I
was expecting Mayday to be be the same as the first time that I saw
it, and, as I made my way through the still early morning Viennese
Mayday streets, I realized that this once proud celebration of work
was no longer that which it was! Where I was expecting marching and
drumming, I found silence, and there where I looked for the flags and
decorations of victorious meaning were only spaces of nothing! All I
could feel and hear were the usual rhythms of the stillness of normal everyday mornings.
Things had fundamentally changed.
When
I first came to Vienna, and that was many years ago, Mayday was still
the highest of days on the socialist calender. It was the one day in
the year when workers celebrated the values of their beliefs, and it
always began before the breaking of dawn.
From all over town, and no matter from how far, workers and their families would march in to the centre, and there, against a background of determination and speeches of unlimited future prosperity they would parade, celebrate and be cheerful. They had rebuilt, and the future was theirs.
But
now things are different. The generations of those days have moved
on, and the workers of now are not those who once turned destruction
into the once wonderful glorious present of then. Mayday has lost its
importance! It is as if a great cloud of indifference has settled
over this day. This once pure red political occasion has simply
become yet another excuse to leave town. Things are too easy. The
work, after all, was done a long time ago. And, that, too, we
shouldn't forget. I, for one, hope that Mayday will be with us for
ever!
