Parlez vous Francais? Do the French speak Diversity?

The daughter of a psychiatrist, a friend, once heard me describe a dream about arriving in class and finding there was a test I hadn't studied for and she said, "Oh, that's just an anxiety dream."  She knew about that. 
Once armed with that concept, I began categorizing my dreams, the ones, obviously, I could remember. 
 I had a whole warehouse of anxiety dreams.

As I got older, anxiety dreams faded, not because the world is a less anxious place, but maybe I'm just to dumb to realize how much I have to be anxious about. 

And there was was longing unfulfilled fantasy dream: a girl I adored from afar from high school would show up periodically and say, "Actually, I don't care about all these other guys who surround me at every party. You're the one I want to be with." That dream has pretty much vanished. Maybe as you get older, you long for different things.

I also had dreams of flying. Now I just fantasize about surf parasailing. But I do this as day dreaming. 

Frustration dreams are becoming more common: Not being able to find my way to wherever I'm going, missing planes at the airport, losing my passport, my keys. This must be more common in aging, as we lose capabilities. I imagine it may be more common among people living in places where the frustration levels are rising, like small town America, or France.

But what really intrigues me is the anxiety dream I never had: Showing up in French class and having the teacher start asking me questions and not being able to understand a word.  That is a dream I should have had, repeatedly. 

Maybe I never had it because 11th grade French was a living nightmare, so I didn't have to have dream about it. Ninth grade French was simply stupid and frustrating. We were given "dialogues" printed out in French and told to memorize them, so we could recite them and write them down. That was it. No real conversation. I could just barely recite them and  I was hopeless at writing them since French is very perverse when written. The only rule I could grasp was however it sounded, that was not the way it was spelled. 

Notice her Cross: Will the French Police object?

Tenth grade French was wonderful because I had Monsieur Hassan, who was Algerian and about as benign and friendly as he could be,  and he taught us all sorts of slang and seemed delighted when we could insert it into our conversations in either English or French and everybody got an "A."

But then, in 11th grade,  there was Mrs. L.  She was  six feet two inches tall,  and she wore hair down to her mid back and she owned only three knit dresses, each of which revealed her very lumpy body in different but equally unattractive ways, and both she and those dresses remained unwashed for far too long.  

Mrs. L clearly clearly needed reassurance she was sultry and still very attractive. She  despised short boys (and I was not tall) and she  spent most of her time in the back of the room sidling up to the two basketball players, who were very tall. She sat next to them in the student desks, giggling and crossing and uncrossing her ungainly legs in what I'm sure she thought was a provocative way. 

She  had us memorize "Le Petite Prince" and other equally excruciating things and she rattled away in rapid Luxembourg  French. 

To get to her class, I had to run the length of about two city blocks, up three flights of stairs from chemistry class,  books and molecular models spilling from under my arms, and by the time I flew into my desk I was a mess, dropping things, trying to pull it all together and she would shake her head disparagingly and say something in French which she then translated for me, "You really are so disorganized. Just hopeless. Tres maladroit. "  

Then the basketball players would saunter into their desks,  a few minutes after the bell rang, and she'd beam and flutter to the back of the room and let Howard, her designated drone, do the class. She had Howard mark our papers and enter the grades into her grade book and fill out our report cards, for which Howard got an "A." 
 I did actually come to a midterm exam in her class and realized I had not opened a book--I had repressed her class so entirely, I simply forgot about it. 

I did not take French my senior year and was determined to never speak another word of French, but they made me take a language in college and it was either one year of French or two years of Latin, so I relented and my college professor was more like Mr. Hassan and we read Camus and Sartre, so in the end, I decided the French weren't necessarily so bad. 

Oh, rip off that offending religious symbol.

But now, watching the French struggle with how to deal with Muslim immigrants, I can only feel sorry for them.  They have decided to cling to a single principle and they don't know how to make that work for them: We are a secular state. No religion in public settings. 

Remember that "No sex please: We're English." Well, now it's: "No religion please: We're French." 

They want a secular society, one in which for certain parts of life, religion can be excluded and everyone can interact just as human beings or as citizens of France, without any other competing loyalties. You can be religious on your own time, or in your own place, but in certain settings, public settings like the beach or the school or court, you have to set aside every other group you might identify with or belong to and become, above all else, simply French.

The problem, of course, is when you have people who insist their religion is their most basic identity and they want to wear yarmulkes or  a cross on a necklace, or a head to toe burka or even a head scarf, well, then you find yourself faced with the police. 

We have the same problem in America, of course, but the assumption is the opposite--for years politicians, Presidents and parents have said, "I'm a Christian first, an American second."   I grew up with each day starting at  school reciting the Lord's Prayer, led my teacher, who was employed by the public school. We had Christmas trees in our classrooms and our holidays were Easter and Christmas and certainly never Yom Kippur or Ramadan. 

Eventually, the Supreme Court and the ACLU moved America to a more "religion neutral"  position, but lately the Scalia court moved America back toward the bad old days.

Here in America, most Muslims seem to want to assimilate into American life and they seem to agree with the basic idea of tolerating beliefs you don't agree with. 

In France, the problem may be, in some cases, there are immigrants who believe tolerating opinions they don't agree with is sacrilege and people who do not believe in Allah should be beheaded post haste. Maybe, if we have that problem in America, a law forbidding the wearing of a burkini or a head scarf would not seem quite as ludicrous. 

But for now, not allowing a person to wear a symbol of his or her religion seems intrusive and intolerant.  How does it hurt me to sit on the beach next to a woman who is covered head to toe? It is true, it may be jarring to see a person in a black burka walking along the beach, but how does that ruin my own experience of the salt air and the blue sea?

And the problem with giving teachers or policemen that sort of power raises the specter in my mind of that horrible Mrs. L, who was just nasty and didn't like short boys, so she'd use any pretext to make life miserable for them.