Ophelia's Journal.

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 2:00 pm Post subject:

I've thought about it.
I've looked at other people's blogs and I really like the format, it's very friendly.

I would probably have written in my blog if it had been available when I started, but I'm happy with this thread. Smile

stcamp · Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 6:57 pm Post subject:

Ophelia,

Thank you for your posts. I remember when we were in Paris we stayed for a couple of weeks in an apt. I would go to the same small store almost daily to pick up small items. One day a well dressed French man was speaking to the owner in a tone that was obviously dismissive and hostile. While I do not understand French it was clear that he berating the man and left after calling him something. The man in the store was Turkish, I think. He looked uncomfortable an embarressed about the incident. What struck me was the scorn an arrogance of the French man.

I remember thinking how similiar that was to scenes I had witnessed in my youth. The racism and the class difference was paramount. This was just a tiny window into something that I believe will be huge for Europe. That week we were walking by Norte Dame and I remember telling my daughter that we should make a point of going inside as it may become a mosque in her lifetime.

I work with a French Jew. We were talking once about the wars and he mentioned how his family once were sitting around with the old family photo books. He told me how his Grandmother would turn a page an point out the people in the photos and say "This one died at Ypres." She would turn a page again "Ah, he died at Ypres as well." Another page, "Oh my, Auschwitz." He told me that many believe that for France something important was bleed away in the trenches and that unknown spirit that made the French what they were has never returned.

Myself, I think that it will be Polands turn once again. They may be the butt of old Eurpoes jokes but they are reproducing like rabbits. No manners, yet they have the vitality. Perhaps once again they will be needed to ride to Europes aide as they did once so long ago.

Steve

Ophelia · Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 11:47 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your input Steve, I appreciate people giving some of their thoughts in this thread.

Americans have a tendency to over-emphasize the catastrophe scenario option, as with Notre Dame becoming a mosque--unless this is only a joke.

I think in that case all the atheists would wake up and unite with the rest of the "souchiens" and demand that it be turned into a museum if no Catholics could be found that would want to pray there, rather than allow it to be turned into a mosque or a hindu temple. That's just the sort of thing that would have the country up in arms.

Smile

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 12:27 pm Post subject:

How the internet responds to my queries is often instructive in itself.

When I started looking up information about immigration, I had expected to have to deal with a lot of unwanted sites made by the far-right.
So far this hasn't happened.

I have two tentative explanations for this:

1- they are satisfied with writing about their themes on their own official sites.

2- They're not in a very good shape at the moment, so they have no aggressive policy on how to grab people's attention on the net.

One other thing did happen though, something I hadn't expected.
Yet, the fact that this has only happened three times so far is a testimony on how mild their influence is.

One day, I was reading a well-written long article about French society.
About two thirds down the way, the writer informed me that the French were depressed, not in the usual much publicized sense of taking more anti-depressants than anybody else, but we were depressed in the sense that, as a nation, we did not know who we were.

As I read I was thinking that I already had enough to worry about with our history and its consequences, so now we were depressed as well.
He said people didn't know what being French meant, and as a consequence we couldn't convey those values to our immigrants.

As I read I thought this was nonsense.
I know what being French is. It's not a matter of claiming you're patriotic, waving flags or singing the national anthem.
It's culture: Voltaire, and the Enlightenment.
The most important part of our cultural belonging is the language.
And for me that means written language (perhaps I lack a sense of an oral tradition).
It's a language that is extraordinarily difficult to write correctly, and is rarely written beautifully in modern literature-- yet when it happens, it's a delight.

I think that for a long time this was so obvious that there was no need to tell anybody about it.
As for immigrants...Well we didn't have any immigration, we thought, only people who came to work for a few years.
The culture was so strong (and so admired by everybody else in the world) that it would speak for itself if your children studied in our schools, no need for any explanations.

The second thing I'd say about being French is landscapes.
I've seen several places that are more impressive, that are awe-inspiring, where the national parks that are bigger, rivers that are longer... but the special light and the clouds over the river Loire is how I would define it.
A German friend of mine once told me that the luminosity of the river Loire had been studied and described , and there was some scientific explanation as to why it was unique-- but I've forgotten.

A few days after I'd read this article a friend of mine phoned me and said " Did you know the French were supposed to be depressed and not know who they were?"

So perhaps the question is in the air.

The two criteria I've mentioned above are mine, I don't know what the majority of the population would say.
Thinking of those criteria, I can imagine a lack of a feeling of national identity if you live in the suburbs , write phonetic French and never go to the countryside.
I'm not looking down on them. I think if that is the case all that is left is football-- and then you only feel a link with France on those days when the national team has won a match.

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 2:50 pm Post subject:

I'll go back to that article.

It explained that the problem for immigrants was twofold: French schools were not transmitting French values, and the children of immigrants from the Maghreb had a double problem because their parents had not transmitted the original culture to them. It is true that many do not speak their parents' language, and only know very little about their country of origin.

I'd like to know why the parents didn't transmit their language, I mean know how things happened in the parents' own words rather than somebody's interpretation of it.

Anyway the consequence is that the young people are lost.

I'd like to know why the boys have more problems than the girls.
If the schools are so hopeless, why are values often successfully transmitted to the girls?

The author of the article went on writing that he personally knew people who worked in social services or for associations in the suburbs who were unable to articulate what it meant to be French and so explain about our values to the children of immigrants.

Then he wrote that a Catholic priest knew about our culture and could explain, and went on with this theme.

I stopped reading, feeling cheated.

A Catholic priest, I wanted to tell him, is an educated man who is used to speaking with the aim to convince. He is not particularly gifted about national identity, he can speak clearly about any subject he chooses, including this one.
I have no objection to his doing so, but I think he should identify himself as a Catholic priest before he reached his conclusion, whether speaking or in writing.
I looked at the top of the page: the name of the site was innocuous, there was no identification such as quotations from the Bible...

Another time, I was confronted to the same situation.
The writer gave a good, well written analysis of the problems of French society, and abruptly ended with one sentence: what we need is Jesus!

Readers from the US may be used to such situations but I think the fact that this happened to me only three times in months of reading says a lot.

The strange thing is that those Catholic writers had given a pertinent analysis of the troubles of society.
To me, it's as if, knowing that they had THE solution, they could afford to be honest in their analysis. Why not be honest if, whatever the problems, you have a one-word answer?

The other writers, on the other hand, always had in mind their own view of the world, and I gather that, whatever that view was, writing an honest analysis of reality would not have been felt to be helpful.
What they wanted was rather to use the particular topic they were writing about to illustrate their views of what society was, or what it should be.

I'm guessing here. I'm not saying that everybody sets about to lie, but that they seem to have vested interests.

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 3:53 pm Post subject: Minimum wage.

The children of immigrants who are rebelling are a minority who are made visible by the media and who provoke strong reactions, both because they refuse our society, and, in some respects I think, because they have integrated the attitude of native French children so well.

Whenever there is trouble in the suburbs and the children of immigrants are inerviewed, one of them will be seen on camera saying "I hate France!"-- only not in such polite terms.

Lenghty explanations (by commentators) will follow of how this is provocation, disappointment with us, rage at feeling rejected...

And here the French are torn. Among people who vote on the right, and especially the elderly, some will be outraged and vote for the far-right, who always do better after such events.

Others will be stunned (perhaps the "nationally depressed" feeling I mentioned before. We know for example that those old buildings in the suburbs shouldn't be there anymore, should be replaced by more humane houses or flats).

Others will concentrate on empathy with the young people.
To me it seems that this sometimes looks like breast-beating on the part of socially-minded leftist people. I interpret this as "They're right to hate us, we deserve it. If I were them, I would hate and punish the French much more."

And where things get really conflictual is when some of those youngsters are asked about work and they say: "There's no work here (in the suburbs). The only work there is is at the minimum salary. And I'm certainly not going to work for the minimum wage!"
Also they say they don't want to do any manual work (we have a lot of unemployment, but a lot of jobs are vacant in construction working for example).

Now the minimum salary, together with our social safety net, is actually something to be proud of. It's not a full pass for entry in the consumer society, but it's decent, and higher than in many other countries.
At the moment it's 8.44 euros per hour. It wouldn't make much sense converting into dollars at the current exchange rate, but the idea that you don't want to work for that money is absurd, especially when you have no qualifications.

What they imply, for some of them, is that they can earn about 1000 euros per month by drug dealing at the lowest level, but not every one of them can be drug dealer.
Anyway, most of the people who hear this on TV started their working life with the minimum wage or just a little above it (like me), and it's hard to swallow when you hear others look down on it.

Yet in this they are not so different from many of the native French of the same age.
They say that it's no use studying because the French won't give them highly paid jobs (which is partly true), and they'd rather be unemployed than do the same jobs as their fathers.

So some values do get transmitted, perhaps horizontally if not from one generation to the next.. Native French youngsters won't do those jobs either, though working in a supermarket for the minimum wage would be acceptable .

The link bewtween making money and making efforts to get into the well-paid jobs seems to have evaporated.
It's always " society owes it to us..."

The whole of society is responsible for this. Part of this is what each individual parent or adult tells or doesn't tell the kids, like a global lie in which everybody wants the others do do the work of being truthful but wants the right to lie within his own family if that's the easiest way.

The Baccalauréat as the entrance exam to universities made perfect sense when it was created.
In the nineteenth century, when it was decided everybody had a right to free secondary and university education, nodybody thought it necessary to add "if you have the brains for university and if you're willing to study".
Now, it would be an offense to say such things.
There are protest movements in universities at the moment.
Yesterday a university student explained on TV that one of the mottos was
"the right to succeed for everybody".
She said it was absurd, and explained it exactly the way I would have interpreted it: every student who accessed university without an entrance exam now should have the RIGHT to get a pass grade, that is 10/20, in his exams.

Lawrence · Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 11:42 am Post subject: Immagration

Dearest Ophelia,
I read through this (thread, blog, post,) I don't know the proper term. I formed the opinion that you are wrestling with the topical issues of this subject as it pertains to France. It is my opinion, when we deal with topical issues we can only treat the sympton not affect a cure. One persons opinion for a solution is as good as another. Changing policies usually just moves the pinch points of pain from one place to another. You may notice from my essay I am incapable of talking, or taking on, topical topics.

Here is my contribution for your consideration. By what right does one person on this planet have to tell another person on this planet where they can live? I mean from the logical core of reasoning. Do not start with nationalistic rights based on the because I was here first attitude.

I can not see any logical reason why the flow of labor should not be as free and easy on this planet as the flow of capital. I am addressing this issue in my Chapter 8 of my essay. It is far and away the most difficult to write.

Keep on keeping on sweet Ophelia. Come back to my blog anytime.
Lawrence

PS One thing Abbe Pierre said that has stuck with me is: "The language of love is not talk. The language of love is what we do."

Ophelia · Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 4:34 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the feedback Lawrence.

stcamp · Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 7:33 pm Post subject:

Ophelia,

You truly puzzle me. Then the French as a whole do. I do not think the future bodes well for the French. I hope I am wrong. I would like to believe the problems you write about were going to be resolved to everyones benefit. Alas, I don't think so. I would write here why, but suprisingly, at least to me, is the amount of anger I feel about this subject.

I am curious what you think about Europes demographics. France has addressed this for more sucessfully than the rest of Europe. Russia is probably the worst case scenario.

Perhaps what bothers me is the knowledge that I am watching a civilization die. Or perhaps it the change, and with it the disapearance of my world.

Steve

Lawrence · Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 10:17 pm Post subject:

Dear Ophelia,
What I'm trying to say in my essay is our systems, governmental and spiritual, are defective. We are unable to fix them in the same way a size 12 shoe does not fit a size 5 foot. We can not fix them until we understand why they are defective and how a new system might meet our needs. My comment to stcamp is that western civilization is headed for the toilet not just France. If the people cannot see that we have more money and less value, more wealth and less character, more time and less patience, etc., things are not going to change. Only the faces of the political landscape promising anything for the power to line their pockets will change.
The French revolution eleminated the Roman Catholic Church declaring the ruler annointed by God. (Actually Nepolean placed the crown on his own head but the cardinal handed him the crown.) But we have learned from our democracies the ologarchy doesn't do any better job of governing, or less tyrannical, than a monarch. I'm struggeling with my chapter 8 which will address this issue. I'll let you know when I post it. Lawrence

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2008 3:56 am Post subject:

Thanks, Steve and Lawrence.

Steve wrote:

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2008 4:18 am Post subject:

To return to the idea of everybody having a right to live where they choose:

Before countries had the means to control their borders, immigration to Europe meant taking lands by force, by hordes of people (Genghis Kahn's warriors) or small groups (Huns, Vikings...)
They wanted the good lands that were already settled, not the deserts and bogs the locals didn't care about.

Once there was control, the colonies, then independent countries of the new world took in immigrants generously, but only insofar as it suited them.
In France, or other European countries, there never was a feeling that we needed large numbers of immigrants to help us settle the wilderness.

The US were generous and unrestrictive (towards European immigrants) in the 19th century, with the 1869 Homestead Act for example.
In the 20th century, they set quotas and regulated things, starting with the 1921 Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act.

This is what I think France should do (simultaneously):

1- Improve relations with the immigrants who are already here, and create the conditions for better integration of the next newcomers.

2- Concentrate on the immigration from Eastern Europe that we have to accept by law.

3- Then take immigration from other countries to bring our immigration level to the same as that as other rich EU members ( at the moment, immigration to France is lower than immigration to Germany for example).

I think this is already an ambitious goal, but it is something that can be expected of us.

Also, another difference with the US in the 19th century is that it cost the state next to nothing to take in those immigrants: the strong survived due to their own efforts, the weak and the sick died. The US thought they had been given a chance.

Now, somebody who arrives in France illegally has the right to social benefits: schooling, health care, but also financial help.
Some of those measures are recent, and I thoroughly agree with these new laws, but I simply cannot see how they could be applied to the millions of people who might want to come, however harsh this may sound.

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2008 9:41 am Post subject: The suburbs, continued

The situation in the suburbs built in the 1960's deteriorated, and yet there was no lack of interest or involvement on the part of the government, nor a lack in public spending.

We have a Ministre de la Ville (Minister for cities), and working under him or her a Secrétaire d'Etat aux Banlieues, perhaps you would call her a junior Minister, whose job is to deal exclusively with the suburbs. In theory this could also mean residential suburbs, but everybody knows that those are happy to finance themselves and don't need ministerial attention.

So, what went wrong? Did corrupt officials appropriate the money? Not at all.

During the last twenty years, we have had 17 different Secrétaires d'Etat aux Banlieues, and each one of them came up with his or her "Plan pour les Banlieues", so it's difficult to build up much enthusiasm or expectation every time a new one is announced.

The mayors of the suburbs explain that there are so many plans and laws that they have to employ people whose jobs is to keep up with the many regulations and formulate requests for subsidy from the government accordingly.
All those plans have piled up, and every time there was a problem the Secrétaire d'Etat was sacked, and the whole process started again.

What did Nicolas Sarkozy do? Appoint Fadela Amara as Secrétaire d'Etat aux Banlieues. She is a good choice, because she comes from the suburbs and has done excellent work in associations (she is from the "Ni Putes ni Soumises" association), so people have a lot of respect for her.
She presented her plan a few weeks ago, I doubt it is extremely different from the previous ones, but I just hope Sarkozy will keep her for four years and let her work.

Lawrence · Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2008 9:58 am Post subject:

Dear Ophelia,
We have a saying that it is insane to do the same thing over again and expect different results. The governmental systems are broken.
RE: Immigration. Humanity has always claimed territory by agression. Do we want to continue with the mindset that it is appropriate to use force to get what you want when you want it. If we do not want to continue, we choose another mind set to live by, set the goal, and then design the method to transition from where we are to where we want to be.
RE: Women. It is said the women's liberation movement must fail because they have no goal as to what a women can become. She has always been defined through the eyes of a man.
RE: Political Action. I think it is good you are concerned with the tribulations of your country. I wish you well in your effort. When I get Chapter 8 of my essay finished I'll give you a


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