Friday, November 18, 2005

pissing the night away

This is an addition to the previous post with respect to piss drunk teenager roaming Place Victor Hugo. Turns out (TV is sometimes informative, who would have guessed) that I didn't even see half of what was going on in Grenoble that night. For one because I was only at the periphery of downtown, but also because I looked too early. Right after midnight is when the situtation downtown escalated. Kids vandalized the centre ville and welcomed the hastily summoned cops with freshly emptied bottles of the already mentioned Beaujolais nouveau.

More cops entered the scene, and the brawl developed into a riot that didn't end until four in the morning. How much more divided can a country be? You have the disenfranchised in the suburbs riot violently for three weeks, desperately crying for attention to their situation, and a week later, the sons and daughters of well-off families let their boredom erupt in scenes that look quite similar but couldn't be any more different.

Maybe that's all presented a little bit to harsh. Certainly one day and three weeks don't explain a country. But in my opinion they are signs of a certain malaise, to use the word that Jacques Chirac picked when he addressed the nation a few days ago. Let's hope that the discussions, round tables, brain storming, soul searching, and talk shows that this hot November trigged will lead to changes and improvements.

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