France is not Europe. The Express is a nasty little rag which inhabits the same slimosphere as the Mail. The French police always overreact to this sort of thin, but the French people love a good, imaginative protest, and at one time it was their constitutional duty to protest! The spirit lives on!
The gilets jaunes protests are a large-scale movement of people who live in the 'new' satellite towns which were built essentially as dormitories without any kind of infrastructure or local economy, so people are absolutely dependent on cars for everything, from going to work to going to the doctor. Without work they can't run their cars, without their cars they can't get work, so when the price of fuel goes up they're double-fucked. Parts of France outside the major cities are called 'the desert'. Some of them are a real mess - i've seen when I've cycled through. The economy, the car, television and now the internet have gutted them, so if people can't afford to run their car, they're stuffed. Hopefully next year I'll cycle the so-called diagonale vide - the empty diagonal - from Strasbourg to Hendaye, and see even more of it. The protesters come from a class which feels that it is despised and looked down on by the metropolitan elites. Macron seemed - or allowed people to believe - that he was not like the others, even though he went to the same elite training schools. He is not living up to expectations, so people who harboured those expectations are turning on him. There is also the dilemma of the environment versus the automobile, and the impact that attempts to square this will have on social life and societies built around the internal combustion engine. Definitely something for the US to think about. B > On 24 Nov 2018, at 21:20, Daniel J. Matyola <danmaty...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Ha Europe caught the disease of fanaticism and violence from the US? > > https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1049731/France-protests-paris-riots-police-emmanuel-macron-latest-france-news > > Dan Matyola > http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/danieljmatyola > -- > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
