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Riots in France
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Dangers of a flat world

French youth are screaming for all of us

The demonstrations that have brought French young people out to the streets in recent days have brought the color back to the cheeks of everyone who works for a living, who gets up in the morning, goes to work, and comes home at the end of the month with a salary slip.

 

Without being "kitchy," these demonstrations have renewed a bit of pride to the phrase "human dignity."

 

For the first time in many years, a huge number of people have stood up, gotten off their comfy chairs in front of the TV and taken to the streets to demand equal, honest, fair and honorable treatment. They have demanded the right not to be thrown into the street due to cost-benefit considerations.

 

Cry of the millions

 

The violent cry of the French youth is the deaf shout of millions of people around the world, who since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of globalization have been trampled under the quickly revolving wheels of the money revolution.

 

International corporations have used their spiked wheels to trample the rights of workers to honorable pensions, to health insurance, to a minimum of respect – the right to grow old in comfort.

 

In the modern world – the world of the internet, the world of outsourcing, of moving jobs from coast to coast – people have become but tools, pawns in a game between competing conglomerates, of so many Wal-Marts who use worker's natural rights like land owners use a whip.

 

Workers into slaves

 

In many places, the crazed pursuit of success and big money on one hand, and after minimum sources of income on the other, has turned many workers into slaves, victims of cold calculations and advantageous employers.

 

From India, China, Malaysia, Vietnam and other modern slave states, where workers produce the latest fashions for the fat, developed West for appalling wages; to the developing countries of eastern Europe hungry for success, to the industrialized, satisfied West – the little guy, the simple worker and the blue collar folks have become little more than lemons to be squeezed dry, to be discarded without pangs of conscious when they are used up.

 

Why? Because in the modern world, the value of a laptop computer with a good internet connection is much more valuable than 100 Chinese workers in a Nike shoe factory, delirious from their round-the-clock labors.

 

World is flat

 

In his book "The World is Flat," New York Times journalist and columnist Thomas Friedman praises the new global reality that makes it possible for Chinese and Indian workers to do blue-collar work of Western workers and a tenth of the cost, and to thus aspire to a higher standard of living.

 

At the same time, he praises the willingness of eastern European countries to accept upon themselves the rules of the free market, and condemns the stiff bureaucracy of labor laws in Western Europe.

 

The world may indeed be flat, and the media revolution may indeed make it possible for every person with an internet connection to become part of the global village.

 

But at what cost? This flattening out has also flattened the simple guy and made him irrelevant. The wheels of the bulldozer may have trampled obstacles and brought down walls, but they have also trampled the dignity of millions who failed to keep up by connecting to the world of optical fibers.

 

Cry of the trampled

 

The young people of France today are shouting out the cry of the trampled – in Paris, Toulouse, and around the Republic. Because after years of plenty and ignoring the plight of downtrodden workers, the flattening knife is now pointed at French throats.

 

And when the knife is that close, it's good that they are yelling, and are unprepared to be drawn after the bulldozer that is flattening not only the world, but the people in it as well.

 

Will their cry spread throughout France? Will the tri-color come to include other colors as well?

 


פרסום ראשון: 03.19.06, 12:05
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