How many depressions and suicides will it take to bring about the suffering inflicted by the confinement measures on students?
Should we add a moral debt to the public and ecological debt that they will spend their lives repaying in vain?
Should we continue to pour new documents into the lawsuit that this generation will bring just as vainly to the “boomers”, at the risk of increasing divisions between age groups?
Student discomfort, it is true, is not counted as the deaths of the Covid.
It oozes.
We hear it expressed through the voices of young people themselves, their parents, their teachers.
Not to mention that the most affected of them are also the most disadvantaged.
This is why we, parish priests, university chaplains, pastors who hear the distress that the numbers do not say, speak out and question:
Do we want these twenty-year-old walled-in people to ruminate against the generation that preceded them all their lives with resentment of having been deprived of their youth?
Do we want these twenty-year-old walled-in people to ruminate against the generation that preceded them all their lives with resentment of having been deprived of their youth?
Is it fair to make them pay the price for our dismay in front of a virus which is neither the first nor the last of its kind and besides striking only very few of them?
The ban on going to class is a message of defiance addressed to our youth.
The future starts well!
What credit will politicians have with her from now on?
How will they be able to solicit the trust of the one they have not trusted?
To read also:
Students: "Social isolation now threatens part of the 'distanced generation'"
What if the students weren't inconsistent braggarts but responsible, inventive young adults better placed than any administration to find ways to work side by side without putting the lives of others in danger?
They are bubbling with ideas, we sing to them all the time.
They are steeped in ideals and their strengths are still intact.
Is not it true?
Their desire to live is also intact!
So?
"Stay in bed!"
Some people hear themselves answer who report their depression to their teachers.
Or, to those who see their good years screwed up, we offer a “psy ticket”!
At twenty, we hope for better.
A successful life is made up of challenges, daring, disinterestedness, as the medical profession is currently demonstrating.
Yes, this epidemic is dangerous, it must be fought, the most fragile protected.
But the world is dangerous, life full of risks, and if it was not, what a bore!
Life without the idea of death is nothing but eternal survival.
Do we want this?
Should we pay the primacy of well-being the tribute of its apparent victory over all metaphysics?
We can't do it.
As Christians, we believe that we have only one life and that it is eternal: two good reasons not to miss it.
Read also:
"To abandon the youth is to push them towards a protest vote"
And it is certainly not necessary to share our faith to dream a life like a “Vendée Globe” rather than an endless confined cruise.
A successful life is made up of challenges, daring, disinterestedness, as the medical profession is currently demonstrating.
Our rulers themselves give themselves without moderation.
They are entitled to our support and it is in this spirit that we alert them.
But it is also up to the students to demonstrate by responsible actions that they deserve better than this stifling mothering.
It is up to them to remind this country seized with the torpor of an old man that it is time to wake up.
And it's up to us to encourage them.
List of signatories: P. Matthieu de Laubier, P. Martin Guyot, P. Thibaut de Rincquesen, P. Charles-Antoine Fogielman, P. Antoine Vidalin, Jean-Hugues Petit, P. Augustin Bourgue, P. Maxime Deurbergue, P. Nicodème Ferré, P. Christophe Hédon, P. Florent Urfels, P. Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu, P. Benoît Laignelot, P. Jean-Christophe de Nadaï, P. Philippe Néouze, P. Stéphane Palaz, P. Maximilien Maurice, P. Baudouin de La Bigne, Fr. Renaud Silly op, P. Charles-Marie Rigail, P. Louis Bardon, P. Ambroise Riché, P. Julien Durodié, P. Mathieu de Warren, Fr. Jean Dominique Bruneel op, Fr. Jean- Baptiste Rendu, Fr. Paul-Emmanuel Lallemant, Fr. Arnaud Mougin, Fr. Timothée Lagabrielle op priests, deacons, student chaplains.