"Celebrating the democracy of dance" by Alexandra Marshall | April 6, 2009
Alexandra Marshall, a guest columnist, is the author of "The Court of Common Pleas" and four other novels.
I'M ON my way to Guadeloupe, a French Caribbean island whose active volcano is tame compared with last month's eruption of rioting after a 44-day general strike. Protests were initiated by a coalition of union groups demanding for low-wage workers a $250 monthly raise to compensate for the high cost of fuel and food, but with an unemployment rate of 60 percent for people under 25, bands of armed youth in hooded sweatshirts manned the barricades.
Ignoring the demonstrations for a full month, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister François Fillon of France are accused by the coalition of "treating the troubles as a distant colonial flare-up." And though a settlement was negotiated and the violence has now reportedly subsided, once those initial demands came to be defined in terms of race and class, tensions simmering since slave days boiled over in a society where the traditional landowning families still control up to 90 percent of the estimated wealth.
How LITTLE THINGS have CHANGED, huh?
My reason for going there....
NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY of that MESSY STUFF!
Yeah, that's a leading opinion today. I guess the message is DON'T PROTEST, and that sounds very in tune with the Globe here. I'm not going into that now.
Related: When Was the Last Time You Heard About.... Guadeloupe?
Europeans Don't Eat S***!
Need I even type it?
