[Peace-discuss] Take Your Desires For Reality....

[pengdust at aol.com]

Young people are waking up.... everywhere but here? Wonder what our REAL youth unemployment rate is in the US, CU? Might easily be over %25. The other %72 are haunted by underemployment and precarity, see wiki link for definition if needed [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precarity ]. 

Last night someone asked me in a bewildered sort of way, "What are these European kids fighting for?" .... I gave the simple answer: "Their LIVES." I say good for them! They've got spirit!

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French politicians fear youth violence along Greek pattern
    

    

        
            By Celestine Bohlen

            Bloomberg News      
    

    

        Friday, December 19, 2008


    

    

        
PARIS:
Firebombs and breaking glass, tear gas and burning cars. The images
from Greece this month were enough to put the fear of youth into the
hearts of European leaders.






That dread was palpable in France when President Nicolas Sarkozy
abruptly delayed for one year a plan to overhaul France's high schools,
after students from Bordeaux to Brittany took to the streets in protest.






Those demonstrations haven't turned violent yet. But French history,
and the example of Greece, suggests they might. At least that is what
people like Laurent Fabius, a Socialist Party leader, are saying on
French radio.






"What we see in Greece is not out of the realm of possibility in
France," Fabius said on Europe 1. "When you have such an economic
depression, such soci
al despair, all it takes is a match."


An editorial in the daily newspaper Libération said the decision to
delay the education law - which would change schedules and academic
requirements for the last three years of lycée, or high school - was
purely defensive. "One senses among the team in power a hesitation, a
dread of riots, a fear of explosion," wrote Didier Pourquery.






The rapid rise in unemployment among people under age 25,
particularly in southern Europe, is one concern. In Spain, for
instance, youth unemployment shot up from 18.4 percent in August 2007
to 28.1 percent in October 2008. The average jobless rate for young
people in Italy, Greece and France is well above the average for the
European Union, according to Eurostat, the Luxembourg agency that
collects EU statistics.






"All these events have at their core a sense among youth that their
lives are not going anywhere, and they have nothing to lose," said Ken
Dubin, a visiting associate professor at University Carlos III in
Madrid.





But economics alone doesn't explain the restlessness in universities
and high schools. Students, after all, have no jobs to lose.






Experts speak of another worry, which is the seemingly anachronistic
resurgence of vague radical movements, loosely called anarchist, which
hark back to the destructive ideology of Mikhail Bakunin, the
19th-century Russian revolutionary, and to the rebellious rhetoric of
the 1960s and 1970s.


Some of it isn't that threatening, like recurring
 play of the 1979
song, "Another Brick in the Wall," by Pink Floyd, on Alpha radio during
the week-long protests in Athens. "We don't need no education / We
don't need no thought control / No dark sarcasm in the classroom," goes
the angry refrain.


But the violence wasn't far behind the slogans. By the third day of
rioting, the estimated damage in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece's two
biggest cities, was more than €1 billion, or $1.4 billion.


The riots in Greece began as spontaneous protests to the killing of
a 15-year-old student by the police in Athens on Dec. 6, after a group
of youths stoned a police car. It spread to university centers around
the country, quickly morphing into a wider contest between young people
and the police and by extension, the government. Tens of thousands of
people continued the protests on Thursday.






Greece has a history of violent demonstrations that dates from the
colonels' junta in the 1970s. The National Technical University in
Athens, known as the Polytechnic, has been off-limits to police in
homage to the events of Nov. 17, 1973, when the government sent a tank
crashing though the university gates, igniting a popular uprising.






Now the Polytechnic is again occupied by protesters, who have built
barricades from broken marble and paving stones, and stockpiled Molotov
cocktails and other weapons.





The role of these so-called anarchists in the weeklong protests is
still not clear. But their message - loaded with anti-capitalist,
anti
-government and anti-globalization themes - is unmistakable. Also
clear is their bent for violence.





"What they provide is a template that others with less ideological
commitment can use," said Stathis Kalyvas, a political science
professor at Yale University. "If you have a demonstration where 10 of
them start throwing stones, soon the 500 others following them will
join in."






France isn't the only country nervously watching the events in
Greece. Students in Italy and Spain have also staged protests against
proposed changes to schools and universities recently. In Madrid,
Barcelona and Seville, they took over administration offices this month
in opposition to changes mandated by the EU that would link higher
education to marketable job skills.





In Italy, hundreds of thousands of angry teachers, students and
parents mobbed Rome on Oct. 30 to protest an overhaul of the education
system, in what was described as the largest student demonstration
since 1968.






Each country brings its own issues, and history, to these
demonstrations; like Greece, France has a tradition of street protests
turning ugly.






In October 2005, youths in the suburban and largely Muslim ghettoes
of Paris went on a rampage, causing €160 million in damage, after two
teenagers were killed as they were being chased by police. In 2006,
university students staged demonstrations that dissipated into random
violence, as hundreds of thousands protested a proposed law that would
create flexible work contracts for 
young people. The government
eventually withdrew the legislation.






This year's "lycée" protests also carried hints of escalating
violence. A high school principals' association in the Bouches-du-Rhône
region warned on Dec. 5 of "an unheard-of aggression and
near-impossibility of dialogue" with protesting students. Philippe
Guittet, head of the association, told the newspaper Le Monde that he
suspected the protests were propelled by "militant forces" working
behind the scenes.





France chose to defuse the situation by withdrawing the contested
schools legislation. In Greece, the government, eager to restore calm,
has decided for now to cede the Polytechnic to the protestors.


That might buy peace for now, but it won't necessarily soothe the anger.
    
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