Saturday, March 23, 2019

Not WASPs

I'd been keeping half an ear tuned to news from France, and the Yellow Jackets are getting to be kind of a big deal there. But since everything I get is from BBC, I haven't been able to de-convolute the filtering bias they use. It helps to have other sources of information, and the protests just haven't been considered very newsworthy here.

I should have been more observant--there's an interesting detail in the Wikipedia link, brought out in the article by Sara Hoyt that's getting attention now.

Friends in France tell me that the Yellow Jackets are mostly middle class and middle aged, people who never even joined in the perennial French sport of striking; people who have jobs, bills, families. My corroborative evidence for this is that the protests happen mostly on the weekend. These people are busy the rest of the time, and can’t afford to lose their jobs.

"On the weekend." That was something I should have noticed. Yes, this could become a very big deal--if there are enough middle-class left in France.

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