TO THE STREETS ! If you are in favor of just about anything and things are not, for some unknown reason, going exactly your way, there remains just one thing which can and must be done – that is to take it “to the streets!”
That's what several hundred thousand of the good people of Paris, France are doing this evening - having a jolly old rioting time of it eagerly going against all who would oppose them, out to have a fine time running madly through the streets seeking out anyone who will try to stop them, crowding in to public places, loitering
in historic squares and visiting walled courtyards usually forbidden. Water hoses, mounted on large trucks stand ready to douse any rioters ahead of
them and when they do, spilling them over each other for twenty feet or more. Policemen dressed in bulky combat gear for as a shell of sorts with their long body shields and advance, looking for all the world like a giant armadillo nosing its way into a patch of swamp grass. There is something in their movements which reminds us of day when Roman soldiers went against foes in much the same fashion.
It seems that those students, teachers, rioters, who are captured are well-trained in putting on a creditable dramatic with much cowering against imagined blows, twisting, falling, screaming, calling out, cringing, writhing in imagined pain, and generally contorting freakishly for any TV camera which may be clicking away nearby. After all, that is the main reason why a riot is still best taken “to the streets !” That's where the TV cameras are thicker.
We had our own street gathering of disturbed citizens early in the week. They were upset over pending migration legislation. They were much better behaved than the Paris paraders who, the papers said “got a bit out-of-hand.”
A.L.M. March 28, 2006 [c317wds]
