CarrollBlog

May 1 in Vienna, as in much of Europe, is a holiday. Sort of their equivalent to Labor Day in the US. When I first arrived here years ago, it was interesting to go downtown to watch the May 1 parade, which at the time was a really big serious affair. Large crowds of different unions, worker's parties, Communists... marched together for their rights and to protest their grievances. But as the years have passed, it appears the marchers got most of what they wanted because the parade has shrunk noticeably. This year it was almost embarrassingly small: a desultory bunch of old Communist Party members(and I mean old-- behind their large red marching banner there were perhaps fifteen people, none younger-looking than 70) holding up signs with angry, albeit dated slogans. WORKER'S RIGHTS! FORWARD INTO THE FUTURE! Students carrying boomboxes playing loud Trance music and cans of beer as well as a few sloppily drawn placards protesting what looked like everything. Happy looking families with their kids marched too, but I don't know what they were protesting because they all looked pretty content and well fed. I noticed that most of the "Solidarity" sort of posters of old had been replaced with lots of "Bush out of Iraq" stuff. The whole event reminded me of something I once read in a book by Eric Hoffer-- Revolutions don't happen in societies where the middle class is content. Judging by the sparse but generally jovial crowd that turned out for yesterday's parade, the Austrians must be pretty content.