Mayday

What do closed shops and protesters have in common? Must be a public holiday in France.

Je détesté protesters. They are just a general pain in the ass. I find the entire thought process that the more people you have walking down the street shouting, blocking traffic, causing the police to have to sit there and babysit you is going to make people pay attention to your cause flawed.

The thing is, if people don't care about what you are protesting when you talk to them one on one, they aren't going to care if there is a thousand of you in the street. If it was a stupid idea for one person, it doesn't magically become smart when there is more of you, it just looks like a bigger group of idiots.

I don't know what this protest was about was indeed stupid or not, there were a lot of people, but not a lot of signs. (Which from a PR perspective is a piss poor job.) I caught one a man with his toddler in a backpack was carrying with four pictures of Sarkosy in bright colored make up, and another proclaiming that a group was from the Universite Sobonne. So really, these people could have had a legitimate cause to be out crowding the streets of my newly adopted home city. But after last summer's OWS fiasco's that multiplied all over the world, I am a bit dubious as to the legitimacy of most protests, particularly ones where most of the people look like they haven't bathed in a few days. Echo I guess would be most protests.

Of course I say this after having seen a very small protest in Saint Michel just when I arrived in Paris dog abuse in Romania. So really my hopes aren't very high.

I understand the desire to protest though. My parents were alive in the 60s, as we're most of my friends parents. American society glorifies those days, as they should given what Martin Luther King Jr. and others were fighting for. The people who joined these movements weren't just black people, what made this so special was that even people who already had these rights were standing with the black community saying they deserved them too. It was beautiful that people stood together, but what made it beautiful was not that they were merely standing together, but that half of them were there actually risking their lives for the cause of civil rights for the black community even though they already had those rights. (read: white people)

But speaking for myself, and my feeling of my generation, I think we are a bunch of attention seeking, adrenaline junkies who haven't actually experienced a real hardship in our lives. The only risk to these people's lives is created by the ones they are protesting with, mainly the under reported murders, rapes, and theft in the OWS encampments.

The proof is written all over the OWS movement. Exactly what do they stand for? Obama is a Fascist, Communism, Tax the Rich, The Banks are Bad, the 99%, Forgive student loans...? The first question I always want to ask someone who boasts about being "active" in OWS is, "What is Communism?" not that I don't know, I'm just curious as to what they think it is. Hell, I almost want to ask them if they can spell it.

I'm not saying there are not real issues that should be protested. Anyone want to talk about women's rights in Middle East? How about homosexual rights in Iran? What about the near civil war in the Sudan? Or human rights in China? Should I keep going?

But these pseudo hippy kids with there iPhones and lap tops and Toms want to whine about their student debt.... The loans they took out to pay for school, rent, and those iPhones and Toms they are sporting. Give me a break. Call me when what you are protesting isn't completely self serving. They want to call Pres. Obama a fascist, never mind the fact that they are the same kids who voted for him the first time around, and they will probably vote for him again, unless we end up with the left version of Ross Perrot to split the crazy ticket.

So, maybe I am burned out by faux intellectual protesters who think and act like they have all the answers. Or maybe I just wanted an open bookstore to buy a copy of Ensemble C'est Tout.