Liberté, Egalité, Securité

While job security may be a thing of the past in America, it's alive and well in France, a country whose citizens love a good fight for what they believe in. Recently the French parliament tried to pass a law allowing employers more freedom to dismiss young workers in less than two years after their dates of hire so companies could save money in lean times and also open up more opportunities for French youth; the unemployment rate for young French people is about 22 percent. But young people already gainfully emploed protested for weeks throughout the country, with the backing of the unions, and the government caved in. President Jacques Chirac has rescinded the law in hopes of finding an alternative for providing jobs to unemployed youth, many of whom are African and Arab.

That seems to be the difference between France and another country - namely, this one. Here, fewer people take to the streets about anything, and so fewer people in power take the masses seriously. If one accepts the argument that demonstrators in this country ended American involvement in Vietnam by forcing the government to negotiate its way out, the masses haven't done much for an encore. Seems that every time we Yanks protest something in the streets, we give up at the first sign of failure - an understandable sentiment, considering the deaf ear the White House gave to protesters who tired to keep the United States from invading Iraq. But, good grief, our jobs are getting outsourced to India and China, and rather than protest that outsourcing by marching and getting the AFL-CIO and the like to back us and all that rot, we shrug, take our severance pay, and get the want ads.

Perhaps the immigration protests being held this week, with their fiery and passionate pleas for social justice, can get "mainstream" America to start demonstrating for other causes, though I doubt it'll happen any time soon. :-(