Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Students Risk Life and Limb to Protest!”

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March 30, 2006

Students Risk Life and Limb to Protest!

Hatched by Dafydd

...Other people's lives and limbs, of course.

In an otherwise dreary New York Times article on the protests in France against businesses being able to fire dud employees, I stumbled across this section:

In a spectacular show of defiance today, some 2,000 students shut down rail traffic at Paris' Gare de Lyon, a key commuter hub and the departure point for high-speed TGV trains heading south. The national rail company, the S.N.C.F., was forced to suspend traffic for two hours after protestors blocked the tracks with wooden beams and other objects, the police said.

In the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles, riot police used tear gas to evacuate several hundred students from the tracks near one railway station.

Protesting students also blocked several highways across the country, causing some 215 miles of traffic jams, Reuters reported.

Traffic was brought to a standstill during the morning rush hour in and around Nantes and Rennes in the west, Lille in the north and Aix-en-Provence in the south. Students also managed to invade the Paris ring road, briefly bringing traffic on the main highway around the capital to a halt. About 50 protesters were arrested.

I wonder how many innocent people could have been injured, maimed, or even died through such shenanigans? Would the protesting students have felt any remorse?

Would they even have given a merde?

An angry protester today, presumably irked at being plucked from his perch trying to derail a high-speed passenger train, had this grievance to air:

One of them, Kark Stoeckel, the leader of France's main union of high school students, the UNL, said: "They did not need to arrest us — we were very calm. By using the police like this they are legitimizing the radicalization of the movement."

I hope the courts give you two years in prison, Kark Stoeckel. Very calmly, of course.

For a nation that constantly chides America for not being compassionate enough, the citoyens of la belle France seem to have very little regard for innocent human life... even their own parents and grandparents. When those 15,000 seniors died because the electricity failed -- all the operators were away during the national month-long holiday -- most of the revelers refused to return home even to bury their dead relatives. They assumed l'Etat (the State) would handle it... they themselves were too busy partying.

L'Etat c'est vous, mes amis. If Marie-Joseph-Paul-Roch-Yves-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 30, 2006, at the time of 5:23 PM