the nurture of my discontent

Life is good, or so
They say, but a stick and a
Slogan speak volumes.

I'm not sure what it is about Europe, but I guess that they're pretty unhappy about something. It seems like every city in every country that I've visited has brought me to the edge of a protest or demonstration about something, excepting, of course, those neutral Swiss.

With topics ranging widely, protests are everywhere. One thing that I particularly like about the demonstrations was something I discovered during a conversation with Alex (I think, anyway... source attribution error! ack!) wherein he noted that the reason that people were protesting on weekends all the time was because they had to be at work during the week. Way to be fired up there, people.

I wonder what it is, though. In the US, there haven't really been large numbers of protests since, well, Vietnam, probably. I was involved in one protest against the Iraq war a couple September 11ths ago, but I was talking to professors about Dunn meadow, and they said that it is no longer the bustling protest nest that it once was. Maybe we're too complacent, maybe they're too bitchy, but I do think it's nice to see that they're willing to go out on a limb to be heard. I respect that a lot.

A list of all the protests I've seen:

• Fair treatment of milk cows (Berlin)
• No more silly taxes, i.e. for-pay public restrooms (Berlin)
• Some mysterious protest that I never found anything out about, but it closed the damn hauptbanhof (Frankfurt)
  
• Riot over a torn Qu'ran (Athens)
• Bringing murderers to justice (London)
• Keep public universities tuition-free (Darmstadt)
  
• Neo-nazi rally (München)