Trouble Comin Every Day

This is a video made from footage of television news reports of street riots. It coulds be live footage from Athens or another Greek city in the last week. On December 6th, a 15 year old teen age boy, Alexandros Andrea Grigoropoulos was shot to death by the police who were responding to violence after a sports match in the Exarchia distict of Central Athens.
The police claim the shot was in self defense and it ricocheted and Grigoropoulos death was accidental. Of course witnesses gave totally diferent versions of the story and it was just another in a series of accidental deaths from a ricochet in the last few months as the conservative goverment tries to crack down on the rising discontent among the youth of Greece.
The shooting sparked a protest, the protest, when countered by aggressive police action grew fast and more than spontaneously into the biggest riots in Greece and Europe in decades.
Obviously, Athens is like a tinder box and it was ready to blow.
The Interior Minister tendsered his resignation and promised exemplary punishment against the police officers involved. This had no effect as the riots grew and spread to other cities.
The proclaimed goal of the protestors and rioters now is the resignation of the repressive goverment. The Police claim that they have run out of tear gas.
The Greek goverment has sunk into a malaise of ineptness and corruption. This became evident to the rest of the world in their useless response to the huge fires that swept Greece two years ago. Much of the Grecian country was destroyed and they were unable to provide relief to thousands of victims.
At the same time, the middle and lower classes are squeezed by inflation. A cup of expresso costs 3 Euros in a cafe and most middle class wage earners with college degrees must work two jobs to keep up. Greece is an extreme example of what is happening in tthe rest of Europe and America. The widening gap between the rich and the poor coupled with goverment economic policies that do not begin to address the issue.
The Greek response has to increase the repressive actions by the police. Protests have been violently squelched which of course leads to a more militant attitude by the opposition.
The rest of Europe watches nervously. There have been sympathy protests here in France and in Italy and Spain. Here, of course, the first thing the conservatives think of is May 1968, when student protests over education escalated into full fledged street battles. Then the labor unions gave their support and brought down DeGaulles goverment. This was one of the driving forces behind Nicolas Sarkozy, he has stated many times that he wants to bury the history of May'68.
This week, the students and teachers in France are demonstrating over proposed educational reforms. Today, The Minister of Education, Xavier D'Arcos backed down on his time line for the reforms, expecting to buy time with the Christmas holidays.
But the iron is in the fire, the fuse is lit, after vacation, thousands more French workers will be layed off, more of Sarkozy's reforms will fail, every day will bring a frsh wave of protests and strikes, you know what? I really see Trouble Comin' Everyday....
play yer harmonica, son....
Travel ALERT ORANGE! If you are going to be in France on January 29th...think twice.........
The soundtrack is "Trouble Comin' Everyday" by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention from the 1965 record, Freak Out. Frank was writing about watching the Watts Riots on Television.
It is one of the nastiest social protest songs ever written...