Abbe Pierres' Last Gift

This post is about how the best laid plans of men and mice never go the way they looked on paper.
In 1954, a 41 year old priest named Abbe Pierre was already leading a one man crusade to help the huge homeless post war populaion of France gain their rights and respect. He had requisitioned an abandoned house outside of Paris in the trash heaps by the railroad tracks where a huge homeless population lived in a shanty town.
The government was cracking down on the homeless in Paris and evicting them from under bridges and the nooks and crannies where they were able to find refuge.
He took his fight to the top of the government and during one of the coldest winters on record, was able to get on the radio and make an impassioned speech that is still a classic today about the plight of the homeless and societies responsibility. Of course his social activism put him at odds with the Vatican. He touched the hearts of the French people and he became a national hero. Today his Emmaus Organization is in 54 countries and has housing and second hand stores all over France. Moreover, the government was forced to enact laws to help poor people get housing which have only been expanded since then.
Abbe Pierre died today at age 94. Up until thte last year or so, he was still a powerful personality making TV appearances and becoming a regular puppet on the satiric political show Les Guignols d'Info.
This winter on the banks of the Canal St. Martin in Paris and now in quite a few other cities, there have appeared organized tent towns of homeless. They have been championed by a lot of the French people and have gotten a lot of publicity because of the Presidential campaign. It became such an embarassment that the government enacted today a rather wishy washy law that supposedly guarenteed the homeless a right to sue for housing and put together a program that should take effect in 5 years.
In other words, they did nothing buut tried to make it look like they took initiative.
Yesterday, though, Segolene Royale was on Canal+ for an hour being interviewed and one of the points she made was that the Socialists are committed to immediate action. They will require vacant apartments that qualify be used for the homeless as well as using govrnment owned land to construct new housing.
The backdrop to all of this has been Nikola Sarkozi, the UMP Candidate for president and Interior Minister who has been hard at work evicting homeless squats and deporting homeless people who don't have their papers in order, penniless back to their country of origin. There have been thousands of these expulsions. He appeals to the extreme right with this kind of stuff. He tries to play the fear card at every opportunity and has been playing dirty smear politics in the American style.
Today, because of Abbe Pierres' death, the cause of the homeless became the national focus. Chirac spoke of burying the Abbe in the Pantheon, Frances' highest honor.
Tonight a 1989 movie was broadcast. A dramatization of the events of that winter in 1954. The villain of the movie was the heartless Interior Minister who triied all he could to stop an unstoppable force like Abbe Pierre. He lost of course, and the last words of the movie were "Mister Interior Minister, Please Stop the Expulsions!"
The movie was prime time and I can guarantee that almost every television was tuned to it! The Abbe could have died at any time, but his moment of death guarantees that this will be etched in the minds of countless French people. Another case of the politics of human compassion overwhelming the calculating machine of a little cruel fascist!