People Who Hate Happy People
Translation from an article published on Lodo Zine #1
The act of skateboarding is something genuinely unique in that it forces some reflection, or at least some serious consideration, about the legitimacy of sharing public spaces. But before attempting to dissect the issue around the legitimacy of communal occupation of urban areas, I believe it is relevant to turn the focus onto the proverbial powder keg that is the act of street skateboarding.
People who hate seeing happy people are always the first line of defense for outdated conservatisms that do not acknowledge the right of existence for all those who do not conform with their behaviors of civil apathy — a form of apathy that leads some people to develop stronger affective ties with the inanimate objects that make up the public space (which, in theory, belongs to everyone) rather than with the human beings who interact with it.
The people who hate seeing happy people are those who sit on a bench when they see skaters using it, they are also the ones who call the police to exhaustion, unnecessarily pressuring authorities, who in turn release their frustrations on those who dare to smile through the process of finding new uses for spaces that are otherwise static, occasionally used, or mostly ignored.
I label them as ‘people who hate seeing happy people’ because they parasitically feed on a fictitious sense of authority. And the bigger the smiles of those riding their skateboards, the greater the disproportionality of the response — the more visible someone else’s happiness, the stronger the visceral impulse that distorts the expressions of those who unload a sea of personal frustrations onto individuals who dare to break the molds of what is the worst injustice that can be done to our cities/towns/villages: emotionally detaching from them.
Skateboarding culture fosters a tremendous appreciation for the identity and makeup of the urban spaces in which it expresses itself. There are no two identical skate communities, in the Algarve and beyond, simply because these communities are critically affected and shaped by specific factors such as architecture, local socio-economic conditions, weather, public transportation, or specialized equipment at their disposal.
And regardless of the people who hate seeing happy people (whoever they may be), skateboarding persists and insists on shaping citizens who value, and add value to, public spaces. Active interaction with the environments in which skateboarders are immersed is something that breathes life back into spaces that have been condemned to a ‘nonexistent existence,’ where park benches only serve the purpose of watching life idly go by, stairs are obstacles on the way to work, and walls are mere boundaries or spatial demarcations. Skateboarding rescues that same bench from inertia, creates art on the stairs, and constructs new creative narratives for confined spaces.
Skateboarding is one of the most effective tools to combat the disconnect from public spaces (and their respective communities) that is endemic in contemporary societies, it also serves the purpose of regenerating and culturally reeducating many of the cities/towns/villages still haunted by the souls of people who hate seeing happy people.
