I regret that I wasn't able to live-blog the results from France's presidential election yesterday, but I have a good excuse to explain my absence......I was meeting with some of the voters from that election.
It was my pleasure on Sunday to play host to two very wonderful and charming members of France's Blue Revolution, the populist movement founded in late 2005 to reclaim France's lost liberties. It was "La Revolution Bleue"s habit of holding regular meetings in France, that inspired us to hold similar meetings of our own, in public, here in Vancouver, as of January 2006.
By pure coincidence, a French couple who participate in that organization had, quite a while ago, selected our fair city as the site for their vacation this year; imagine their surprise when they subsequently discovered our existence, and the work we had been doing on their behalf.
They took the initiative to contact me, and our correspondance culminated in our getting together yesterday for a (regrettably wet) guided tour through some of my favorite Vancouver sites.
Our face-to-face discussions proved to be very emotional for me; I found myself thinking over our talk for many hours following our encounter, my mind struggling to imagine living under such conditions. (I offered a far more lengthy than usual prayer of thanks that night for having been blessed to be born in Canada) As gripping as it is to read newspaper headlines or blog articles (or blog comments) on France's problems, it is something far more touching to physically meet and greet people confronting these problems as an inescapable part of their daily lives.
Here it is, a full day later, and I remain deeply moved by the stories that were shared. Sorting through my emotions and shaping them into more intellectual patterns, I emerge even more committed towards acting as I can to be of continued service to the patriotic French in their fight to free themselves from the noose placed around their collective necks through the socialist dirigisme of too many years reign.
We have so many allies, and potential friends, in France. The conservative habit, exacerbated on blogs, of tarring all the French with blanket condemnations such as "they deserve what they are getting", does a great disservice to the decent people there trying to live rightly and justly.
The gracious couple I met most certainly do not "deserve" the ills that have befallen France, that is for sure.
3 comments:
@ Charles Henry
as an ally, I just want'ed to let you know that, though the Pas-de-Calais (le département) has voted Royal, Vimy has not...Unfortunately, they did not have much choice, so they voted Sarkozy !
You can check these results on le figaro.fr ; you can have almost every tiny village you happen to be interested in !
Then, though today is May8th, French TV is giving us "the longest day" ; I wonder what they will give on June6th !
Zazie, I wish you were here to see how Sarkozy is being described this week in our media, you probably wouldn't make up your mind whether to laugh or cry.
For instance, on the Fox news show we watched last night they refered to him as the "pro-american conservative". He's incessantly refered to as the "right-winger Sarkozy" in the press. (maybe if it is repeated often enough, Sarkozy will start to believe it!)
Thanks for the tip on the detailed results. It is interesting to see how things broke down by region. Sarkozy seems to have won by his widest margins in the eastern departments... almost 70% in some cases. Are those mostly rural areas?
For June's television offerings, maybe they will show Battle of Algiers? Or Waterloo, with Rod Steiger?
@ Charles Henry
The "blue" regions on the map are those where Moslem invasion is the more visible.....towns that used to be industrial, and where most people live on the dole nowadays ; suburbs that used to be residential aeras, and are now drugdealers' territory...
I am afraid Sarkozy going first to Malta, then to Sicily, looks very much as if he had gone to meet his "bosses" and receive their orders ; there are strong and recurrent rumors of his having joined Scientology ; I only know for sure he insisted for Tom Cruise to get one of the highest "artistic" medals !
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