OK, we've been getting so many emails from friends and family about what's going on in France with the riots, that I thought I should add this little post.
Basically, it's a non-event right now - we're not seeing anything - and if we didn't have people sending us emails from the US, we probably wouldn't even have known about it. It's not a major topic of conversation at lunch, and it doesn't have everyone on edge or missing work. I think when we use the word 'riot' we have images of Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, when in fact it's more like a bunch of bad teenagers with too much free time on their hands.
I think the biggest problem now is that it's really hard to have police on every single street corner, so once the teenagers realized they could make spontaneous attacks by lighting a trash can on fire, etc., it has become kind of hard to control. Although there have been images of fires and burning cars in the news, there is not a car burning on every street corner.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of disenfranchised youth in France, who basically have nothing better to do than spar with police at night - but I think we're a long way from the country descending into flames and all US citizens being asked to return home.
