Posted on 09/05/2003 7:44:47 AM PDT by knighthawk
France's government buried more than 60 unclaimed bodies Wednesday in a section of Paris's Thiais cemetery historically reserved for paupers. Hundreds more fill France's morgues, awaiting relatives too busy holidaying to arrange for earlier burials. The dead are but a small fraction of the estimated 11,000 people, mostly elderly, who died during France's searing summer heat wave. The country's leaders, including President Jacques Chirac -- who was himself vacationing in Canada during the worst days of the crisis -- are now looking for ways the country may atone for its collective neglect and ensure the tragedy is never repeated.
So far, the tone of debate is hardly impressive. Officials are proposing to eliminate one of the country's 11 national holidays to pay for better elderly care. (In a sign of the times in post-Christian Europe, Christmas was the first put up for the chopping block.) Hamlaoui Mekachera, the French War Veterans Minister, says taxes generated by the extra workday would help finance more funding for the elderly. "It's a very important, very strong symbol," he told the Associated Press last week. "The gesture of solidarity is more important than the financial gesture ... so we never witness again what we saw."
We doubt whether extra spending can cure a society in which families would wile away the weeks on the Riviera while gramma sweats out 38C heat in her un-air-conditioned Paris apartment. Still, the idea isn't bad: Like most pampered Western European nations, France gives its workers far too many vacations -- and stripping them of a day off would do them some good.
The plan probably won't get far, though -- for Mr. Mekachera's logic carries little sway with France's political left. "There's no question of touching holidays," said Communist lawmaker Alain Bocquet. Jean-Claude Mailly, a prominent trade union leader, suggested France was rich enough to come up with the money without touching workers' holidays and said working an extra day to pay for supporting the elderly is "enforced charity, totally unacceptable."
The remarks are telling. Even in the shadow of the nation's summer tragedy, the spirit of sloth reigns supreme. This is a country, remember, where workers are legally entitled to 35-hour work weeks and nearly a month-and-a-half paid vacation per year. Thanks to a socialist nanny-state that has destroyed citizens' sense of individual responsibility, lazy self-entitlement has become as French as camembert and snooty waiters.
Normally, this modern French attitude is merely annoying. But for thousands of elderly French men and women abandoned by their families over the summer, it has proven to be nothing less than deadly.
Oops.
If this is true (which it is) then the entire French socialist system is based on a totally unacceptable principle.
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