XPost: houston.general   
   From: aw722@blockspam.org   
      
   Anyone who has lived in France, as I have, could have seen these riots   
   coming.   
      
   France's approach to its poor is to give them food, shelter, clothing,   
   and basic medical care, and then warehouse them in "hlm"s (housing   
   projects) and forget about them.  The US experimented with the same   
   approach in the 1960s - when we put up housing projects like the Robert   
   Taylor Homes in Chicago.  But we realized just how bad it is to do this   
   to our poor, and we made attempts (albeit mostly failed ones) to fix the   
   situation. France never did.   
      
   But it's not just this "feed 'em and forget 'em" approach to the poor   
   that led to the riots.  It was combined with racism in all aspects of   
   French life.  Even wealthy and educated French people often deride "les   
   arabs" (in France an "arab" is any non-aryan immigrant) as dirty,   
   stupid, prone to 'conneries' (mischeif), and in general useless.  It's   
   an image strikingly similar to that held by some Americans towards   
   Central and South Americans.  But whereas we hire these impovershed   
   immigrants to work on our construction sites, mow our lawns, and clean   
   our houses, the French often don't.  There are no laws against   
   discrimination in hiring in France.   
      
   The mixture was seasoned by the oft-denied love affair that the French   
   have with things American - McDonalds; Coca Cola; "le weekend;" - and   
   the simultaneous disgust that many of their poor, Muslim immigrants feel   
   towards these things (an extension of their hatred of America).   
      
   It was a recipie for disaster.  Hopefully Chirac and the French people   
   can open their eyes - similar to the way we did in the US on seeing   
   footage from the Superdome during Katrina's aftermath - and do something   
   to fix the situations.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)