Still Life with Robin: Vive la France, Vive Le Parc-Cleveland

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By Peggy Robin

It’s over! The French elections, I mean. Here I was, holding my breath (metaphorically, at least) since April 23rd, when it became an actual possibility that the far right, anti-EU, anti-NATO candidate Marine LePen could become President of France. The polls gave her slim chance of winning….but we’d seen the polls proved wrong before, in both the Brexit vote and in the US Presidential results

And what has this to do with Cleveland Park, you might ask. This is, after all, a column about things much closer to home....

Well, if Marine LePen had won, that would have started the process to pull France out of the European Union, and let’s face it, that outcome, following on the heels of Brexit, would surely mean the beginning of the end of the EU. Not much of a leap from there to the end of NATO. And with NATO gone, what’s to stop Putin from taking the rest of Ukraine, then Estonia, and then on to the other Baltic states? Chaos in a disintegrating Europe would surely brings with it worldwide economic instability, including the collapse of currencies, the breakdown on social order, and the rise of dictatorships. Which was the pattern that led up to both the first and second world wars. We would have every reason to assume that running the pattern a third time would unleash a third world war on a scale even greater than the first two. And how could that not affect us all here in Cleveland Park? So Macron’s victory today is something for us to celebrate....and it underscores the meaning of the title, "All Life Is Local"! 

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Still Life with Robin is posted on the Cleveland Park Listserv and on All Life Is Local, usually on Saturdays, but on some special occasions (such as following a major French election) on Sundays.