Out on strike

The last two days have been very exciting for a lot of people in France, and more-than-usually quiet for me.  The cause?  A national strike over the age of retirement, which the Sarkozy government wants to raise from 60 to 62.  This has inspired industrial, service, and professional unions to a series of strikes, which have been going on sporadically since before my arrival.  Yesterday, even the students in my school walked out in protest.  It is sort-of inspiring to see high school students responding with action to questions of social justice, when cynicism and apathy are so rampant among teenagers everywhere I lived growing up (no offense, Obama generation).  It would probably be more inspiring if I imagined that most of the students were more excited to protect the pensions of their elders than they are to cut school, go into town, and get a kebab....but perhaps it is better not to ask those questions.

I am not sure of my own perspective on the strike issue.  I certainly do not know enough about the problem to debate any French person on the subject, but it is odd--of all my friends and relations over 60, the majority are not even about to retire, and if they did, the pensions their jobs provide would not be able to support them in comfort.  Many of them have not worked at one job long enough to earn a significant pension.  I guess it seems, from my millennial-generation perspective, that the workplace culture of staying 40 years with the same company and then living off the pension accrued during that time is giving way to one which is more fluid and one in which people live longer and stay active later in life.  Of course, that is a young person's idea, and an American's.  Here, I see older middle-aged white guys driving the steam shovels that are fixing the road down in the village (something I have never seen in the States), and I understand that after a career of work in heavy industry, 60 is about time to retire and live in state-sponsored comfort.  So I don't know what to think.  Fortunately, the Sarkozy government is not calling on me to mediate.

One thing I do know, is that the strike has thrown a monkey wrench in my activities for the last couple days.  I have had almost nothing to do for two days,  and because of train travel being suspended, I can't take advantage of the freedom to go to the neighboring town and visit friends (Cosne does not have much of a happening scene.)  Classes were more or less canceled yesterday, which I had anticipated, but then the strike continued on today, in an impromptu and inconvenient manner (which I suppose was the goal).  I was working in the teacher's lounge on my lesson plans this morning, when the students from the high school's professional campus staged a rally in front of the main building.  It was like the storming of the Bastille, minus the starving peasants, violence, and destruction.