Seanm
pfm Member
Culture war here is a one-sided generation war too. All the anti-woke, anti-cancel culture stuff that fills the papers is designed to enrage older people about black people in particular but also young people in general.Just a thought that’s come to mind.
In France - which may or may not have a right wing government - the group which is being used as scapegoat is not a marginal minority, but a huge group - the young.
Maybe others will see it differently, I’m not a native Francophone and I don’t live there, so I could easily have misunderstood things. I think the French media and the French political powers are busy blaming the irresponsibility of the young for the rise in new COVID cases. Not black or Muslim or working class or dispossessed young - all of them, the lot. The idea is that they haven’t controlled themselves over the past few months, they’ve been having parties, getting close, and the result: the disease is getting increasingly rampant.
This has had serious consequences: major cities, including Paris, Marseille, Strasbourg and many others, have made masks compulsory in all public places, inside and out. That’s a major imposition, I certainly would hate it. The reason given for the new regulation is this: the young aren’t disciplined enough to observe social distancing, so we have no choice. Masks outside are unnecessary at best if you keep your distance, but the French young population have shown that they can’t be trusted to do that - that’s the line being spun.
It’s interesting how this generational thing has played out here because central to the British culture war is the idea that young people have become weak and risk -averse, and the right wing ghouls pushing culture war are generally anti-lockdown. So it’s difficult for the papers to vilify young people for their reckless disregard for the rules etc. Instead we’ve had this kind of thing:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/self-pitying-woke-generation-needed-war-coronavirus-got-one/
Interestingly young people seem not to have cottoned on to fact that their elders and betters hate them so much. All the polling suggests more support for lockdown amongst the young than the old, and since everyone knows they’re less vulnerable you’d have to put this down to concern for older people.