Watching black-helmeted military police subdue protesters in the streets of Riga this Tuesday felt shocking on two distinct levels. For one thing, these are the streets on which I grew up – hey, is that my favorite coffee house they’re smashing? Far more jarring, however, is the gulf between the protests’ intensity and what I have, in my 16 years there, come to know and partly absorb: the Latvian temperament.

This is, after all, the country whose idea of protest, as parliament member Krisjanis Karins told the New York Times, consists of “standing, singing and just going home,” never crossing on red along the way. (Latvians’ near-clinical aversion to jaywalking is a point of national pride and international ridicule). Its 1991 transition to independent statehood was the quietest, most orderly affair imaginable amid the chaos of the Soviet Union’s breakup. So this week, as crowds looted a boutique selling a bitter aperitif called Latvijas Balzams – an action tantamount to Vermont protesters trashing a maple-syrup factory – this was the thought that came to mind: wow, something got their goat worse than the Soviet Union ever did.

That something is, of course, the country’s financial meltdown. Since gaining independence, Latvia, perhaps more so than other Baltic states, threw its lot in with the banking industry. In the mid-1990s, it became a no-questions-asked cash cubby for the emergent New Russian fortunes of dubious origin. An unforgettable Russian ad for Latvia’s then-largest bank, Parex, simply stated: “Parex. We’re closer than Switzerland.” Wink wink. Latvia cleaned up its banking practices prior to entering the World Trade Organization and the European Union, but its economic bubble – led by unnaturally luxe domestic consumption – had gained its own momentum. By 2006, annual GDP was in double digits and real estate was appreciating at five percent a month. By 2007, the kind of apartment my family sold in 1992 for $40,000 was worth over a million. I’ve watched my formerly shabby-chic hometown become a miniature personification of the fears most New Yorkers harbored about Manhattan: a tidy, sleepy, ultimately unsustainable sandbox for the rich. As Russian-Latvian writer Aleksandr Garros put it to me at the time, “You can buy a [$5,000] Bang & Olufsen stereo here but not a Sony. Our retail somehow skips the entire middle class.” The main character of his debut novel, translated into English as Headcrusher, is a low-level employee at a Latvian bank named “Rex” – wink wink – driven to murderous rage by his peers’ inexplicable prosperity.

A year later, that prosperity, natural or not, is gone. Salaries are going down, the formerly mighty lat is devaluing, and the unemployment – artificially stanched in previous years by economic migration to other EU countries – is poised to explode. When you work in its debts, the current capitalization of the entire country, goes a popular half-joke, is less than Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s fortune: perhaps Abramovich would like to buy Latvia as a port for his yacht.

To the Stateside reader, the riots in Riga may sound like just another trickle of bad news in a constant roaring flow of worse news; yet the totality of the Latvian collapse, and the unusual purity of the bubble that preceded it, make Tuesday’s events more than just another skirmish brought on by a lousy global economy and a foul national mood. Not only is Latvia a handy cautionary tale about worshipping the free market (we have a steady supply of those for now); the thrown rocks on these cobblestone streets mean that even some of the world’s calmest nerves are fraying.