How not to convince your government to help you

A possible alternative headline to this Time story out of France. It’s wine terrorists, of course it’s France.

Hurting from over-production and cheap imports, and punished lately by the rising cost of gas, a small group of local wine growers has resorted to “wine terrorism” in a violent attempt to shock the French government into helping them.

This is how they do it. The latest acts, prompting this story, are just two in…

a series of violent and destructive acts by local grape growers over the past three years that has targeted public and private buildings, supermarkets, tanker trucks hauling cheap imported wine, and businesses accused of gouging growers with ever-shrinking prices. Claiming responsibility: a clandestine group known as the “CRAV”, or “Regional Committe of Viticulture Action”.

This has created “vivid tension” in the region.

Jérôme Soulère’s lawyer, Jean-Marie Bourland, doesn’t justify his client’s avowed acts of destruction, but sympathizes with his client’s predicament…”Many of these people are agonizing and dying a slow death,” he says. “For some, I suppose, posing a bomb is their attempt to pose a question.”

Moral equivalence, violence and social issues, grab headlines these days. Sure fire path to anarchy.

There are better ways to pose a question.