Still there

[chani]

I guess your screens keep showing the riots. As Buffy would say "fire is pretty"...

Burned cars are very spectacular and the young people who are doing it know it. But I want to say again that there's NO WAR going on.

The situation is less serious than it shows, I don't feel unsafe at all, but it's more serious than that at the same time because it is a terrible symptom of exasperation rising from marginalized areas that have been deserted by the State and there's a real social suicide going on in those projects besides the obvious tendancy to outdo other deprived housing estates (Paris guys wanting to outdo the suburbs ones, provinces wanting to outdo Paris etc).

It's complicated because some of the rioters are really using violence to express feelings of injustice while others are simply enjoying the rush and the power of fire, but those kids (most of those who have been arrested are minors) are destroying their own districts (cars, sport substructures like gymnasiums, schools etc) as if they didn't care about anything anymore(usually the parents no longer handle them, and those kids stopped going to school), as if they had no values and no hope at all (except making easy money quickly). And they're feeding far right in the lower class, because lower-class families are the first victims of that urban violence. Depressing.

There's so much to do and I don't count on this government to do it. Repression only is certainly not the way to go. Maybe it's too late for that generation though...

Where do we go from there?