French Surrender To Heat
By Ann Huggett (09/22/03)
The old joke about the French planting trees along the Champs Elysée so that German troops could march in comfort took on new meaning today when French authorities upwardly revised their number of heat deaths to nearly 15,000 from the previous official estimate of 11,400. Leading the upward revision was France's biggest undertaker company, General Funeral Services.
During August 2003 temperatures ranged from 95 to 104 and the French, who rejected air conditioning as an expression of vulgar Americanism, staggered under the heat. Complaining that their government did not tell them how to handle themselves with the high temperatures, the French abdicated all personal responsibility for their physical discomfort. Unfamiliar with high temperatures or the cooling effects of water, the French did not keep themselves properly hydrated, preferring to stay behind shuttered windows in apartments with little air circulation.
Hardest hit were the elderly with many dying after the initial heat weakened them. Many were found locked by themselves in those same airless apartments, abandoned by their families who spent August vacationing at the seashore instead of caring for their oldest family members.
Last year it was not unusual for French families to dump their elderly at hospital emergency wards for a month while the family went traveling to beat the heat. Those same hospitals were blamed for the heat deaths of the elderly this year by the French government, which complained about understaffing, inefficiency, and bureaucratic delays.
The Director of the Health Surveillance Institute, Gilles Brucker, refused to accept blame saying, "I can tell you that even if the (Institute) had raised the alarm with all its might, it wouldn't have changed much. To sum up the causes of this tragedy to the lack of an alert is unacceptable" the entire country wasn't prepared for such a catastrophe."
Continuing the round robin of finger pointing was the president of the National General Practitioners Union, Michel Combier, who defended the absence of vacationing doctors and hospital staff by saying, "The problem wasn't that everyone was on vacation, but that the alert system was too weak to allow for hospitals to get everyone back working. And the catastrophe, of course, was totally unpredictable and out of the ordinary."
What with the government blaming the doctors, the doctors blaming the government and metrological centers, and the populace blaming the government, the real culprit was overlooked and that is the socialist mindset the French created for themselves. No other country in the EU suffered such loses but no other country in the EU is as addicted to socialism and the Nanny State as the French. With their government mandated 35-hour workweek, excessive summer vacation time, dependence on government proclamations, and chronic medical short-staffing, they have created a recipe for disaster.
No sane, rational, responsible person waits for Big Brother to issue instructions on heat. They see it's hot and take the appropriate steps to stay cool and comfortable. Responsible workers stagger their vacations within an organization so their company does not founder under everyone's sudden absence. With a socialist mindset, care of the elderly or the weak suddenly becomes everyone else's problem and not the personal responsibility of the family in question. Workers and their companies are then seen as natural enemies. The government must tell them how to react. The French have yet to realize that when a duty is socialistically dumped on everyone it becomes no one's problem; hence the die-offs of the elderly or their abandonment, the absence of critical-care workers in times of emergencies, and the inability to think for themselves. They have produced a dysfunctional society, which rewards personal irresponsibility, abandonment of any type of work ethic, and one, which actually borders on elderly abuse.
Hundreds of corpses had to be buried by the state because their vacationing families had not returned in time to identify their dead relatives or pick them up for a proper burial. Rather than demand that people take personal responsibility and free themselves from state guidelines, the French government is now looking at cost-cutting measures and eliminating one of their national holidays to keep people at their desks. True to the atheistic state, Christmas is the holiday being looked at for elimination.
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