Ok so I'm getting a bit fed up now with the constant striking. From watching french news today it appears that there seem to be a load of people just up for a fight & that these big manifestations give them the excuse to damage shops, cars & generally other people's property.
To hear that students are striking just makes me laugh, it's absurd. Do they understand what retirement even is? Do they know that it has to be paid for somehow & that the alternative to increasing the retirement age is to increase taxes? Taxes that they themselves (should they not be the lazy havoc wrecking morons I've viewed on TV today) will be paying for the next 44 or so years when they are in their prime working years?
It would be interesting to know how many of the people protesting in Paris actually pay contributions to La Retraite? I'm guessing that a good number are recipients of allocations & do not actually do a day's work for their benefits.
There are good people around me who work hard, run their own businesses, need fuel to replenish their stocks and are willing to go to work to provide for their retirement. There are a good number of people who are in agriculture who are working well into their 70's, I don't see them protesting.
There are also a good number of us who have chosen to have children later in life, having reaped the benefits of an education system funded by the state in turn funded by our parents generations who have worked & paid their taxes for years. For us to say we want to retire when our children are still in the school system is ridiculous. We need to contribute over a reasonable period of years in order to merit state provision for our retirement.
With the advances in healthcare increasing the longevity of the lives of our parents & their parents generations (perhaps not our own generation or that below us as these generations it seems, prefer to strike more than work, eat more fast rubbish food & are generally less healthy due to technologising everything) there will be more people claiming retirement or welfare benefits than contributing. It doesn't take an idiot to work out that something has to change.
France - you voted for change so you couldn't have been that naive to think that it wouldn't come at a cost...one way or the other we all have to pay...the stupid thing is, by allowing rioters to cause damage to innocent people & their property & to block hard working people from earning a living you are making the pain worse.
So I may be opinionated on this & you may not agree with me, but I say GET BACK TO WORK/SCHOOL allow us to put petrol in our cars, allow us to go to work to earn a living, students make the most of the education system rather than wasting days protesting in the streets & learning how to be a 'null' and work together to sort out La Crise rather than making it a whole lot worse.