Getting Used To

Humans have this amazing ability to adapt to our changing world. This is an essential evolutionary trait, and mainly, those who fail to adapt, fail to survive. But sometimes this capacity to adapt is not that good, sometimes adapting to changes is not the right option, the right option is fighting back those changes and reverting them.

In the last year France has shown me several examples of this kind of negative adaptation:

During the Gillet Jaunes crisis (that 'movement' that at the start was dubious, eclectic, incoherent and had none of my sympathy, and that soon became one more delirium of French far-left fascism, ultra-violence and reject for anyone that does not belong to their fucking sect) many shops (not just banks, also insurances, shops that would be worth to loot...) had to cover their windows with wood plaques to try to avoid the attacks. Initially this was done just for the day when the violent gatherings were due, Saturdays, but over time, as this yellow sickness was becoming chronic, businesses had no other choice that keeping these protections permanently to reduce costs. Overtime some of these wood plaques would get painted to try to make them attractive. There was a sense of normalization, as if having to cover windows shops from the attacks of some far-left parasites (and the hordes of your average muslim-banlieu-antiFrance-criminal (racaille) that joined them to enjoy the violence, insult, harass and attack normal citizens, burn stuff, and loot shops) was just something unavoidable, as if the state should not use as much force as necessary to immediately stop this madness.

Months ago I read a report (not sure if in Le Monde or Liberation, for the most part I no longer read those leftist pamphlets other than if redirected there from some other site making fun of their islamo-collaborationist articles), that quite shocked me. It explained the 'astuces' (tricks) that a group of young girls living in 'banlieu parisien' (the outskirts, somewhere outside the peripherique - 20 arrondissements) had to use when they wanted to go to Paris by public transport to enjoy a night out. As it was not a good idea to wear a nice, a bit revealing maybe, dress in a wagon that could be infected by undesirables (do I need to explain to what "culture" do 90% of them belong to...?), the girls would go dressed normally with their night clothes in a bag to get changed later on in the flat of one friend living in Paris proper. The crazy thing is that this article was not denouncing this situation, this lack of freedom, as something unacceptable, but just talking about it as a normal, almost cool, situation. This thing of the girls getting changed in one friend flat is not new, but I associate it with the dark times of Franco's dictatorship in Spain, a mechanism to avoid the anger of conservative society, but now, in XXI century France (well, I can easily imagine the same situation in Brussels...) this has become normal.

If you watch this documentary about Saint Denis, that city in the Paris Metropolitan area that hosts the basilica where many French kings are buried and that has now become a Muslim enclave (well, good part of the Seine Saint Denis department, le 93, is a Muslim enclave...), you'll find many shockingly disturbing things, but there's something that particularly caught my attention. Obviously this city is way much cheaper than Paris, and there are some rather beautiful hausmannian buildings (I can say the same for Montreuil, one city in the same department (province) where I've spent some time), so some Parisians are willing to move there to enjoy a much better property. We follow the real state agent walking a potential client along the city's main street, and the conversation is interesting. The client notes that them 'French people of European descent' are a minority in the place, but seems no particularly concerned. Then the agent gives her the 3 main advices for living in the city: never pull out your smartphone on the street, always hold your bag tightly and on the front side, and when driving always make sure your doors are well closed and never put your bag on a seat. Again, the client does not seem particularly surprised, and we learn she will end up buying a property and moving to St Denis. From this to having to live in closed, protected communities like in South Africa, Mexico... there are just a few steps... If you think I'm going too far... there's another fact revealed by the documentary that absolutely goes in this line. In the last decade many companies have set offices in Saint Denis, leveraging the low prices in an extensive area of industrial ruins that has been turned into offices. Apart from the huge security measures adopted to control the access to the premises, many companies have had to put in place a system of mini-buses (navettes) so that those employees going to work by public transport can be driven safely from the Metro station to the Offices and back.