The words chosen by President Macron to respond to the Strasbourg student who challenged him last week are terrifying. Almost as much as those used by Heïdi Soupault in his letter. She told the Head of State of her deep discomfort, linked to the curfew, the successive confinements and their constraints. Her story began with the words “At nineteen, I feel like I’m dead”.
Explaining to the young woman that he was still going to have to “hold on”, the Head of State no doubt made the choice of a language of truth. But he also summed up in one sentence the government’s inability to act effectively against the suffering felt more acutely every day by high school and college students in our country.
Distraught by the devastation that Covid-19 has caused for almost a year among the most fragile and especially the oldest among us, in our economy, our health care system, no one has seen, or wanted to see, mounting the despair of a youth who today has the feeling that the virus is stealing its present and mortgaging its future.
An anguish in the face of which no pedagogical continuity or any “psychic check”, however useful they may be, will be able to stand up. Because it is necessary, to take the measure of things, to remember that if Heïdi Soupault has managed to verbalize his sentence, many others have curled up for weeks in the face of a form of confinement and social withdrawal, for which nothing has prepared them. .
After a complicated spring, the fall relapse allowed a work of undermining to continue, the extent of the damage it caused is almost impossible to determine. And winter will still be long …
It is understood that the youth will have to “hold on”, constrained and forced, until the crisis is over. But above all, there is an urgent need to allow it to regain real prospects. This is what she eats, even more than meals at € 1.
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