Violence and Cultural Misunderstanding

Last year at the end of October violent protests rocked the suburbs of Paris as hundreds of cars were burned. This was the manifestation primarily of immigrants frustrated with life in Paris. Two weeks ago, a bus was burned in Marseilles a southern coastal city of France.

There a man desiring to gain entry to a bus between stops was not let on. Angered, the man threw a molotov cocktail at the bus causing it to erupt in flames badly burning one passenger. One might surmise that this man was looking for a reason to torch the bus. Protesting for their security mass transit workers held a 30 hours strike closing down over a hundred and fifty bus and metro lines last week. Another strike is planned for the end of this week.

This evening on my way home I experienced a similar though less destructive rage. The bus I was on had left its first stop having gone perhaps ten feet when a man ran up and pounded on the bus signaling the driver that he wanted the back door opened. The bus stopped at the red light another twenty feet later. The man ran to catch up and again pounded on the bus signaling the driver that he wanted to enter the bus through the back door which was in front of me. When the light turned green the bus slowly turned the corner. The man ran yelling into the road in front and to the side of the bus. He had the look of an immigrant. As the bus passed him he reached into his shopping bag and hurled a liter and a half bottle of water at the side of the bus. It bounced off the bus and down the road forty or fifty feet. Everyone was thinking of the bus in Marseilles.

The heart of this issue is cultural. In Bolivia there are no bus stops and to catch a bus one simply signals the bus driver. In Guatemala one can enter the bus from any door and the driver's mate will collect the tariff. This evening the man assumed he was target of racial prejudice. However it is law that a passenger must enter through the front door of the bus so as to pay and the non-white bus driver felt no need to stop until the next bus stop. The man would have to wait six minutes for the next bus.