Everyboy inside ! Let us not be reassured by their slow pace. They don’t chase us, they surround us. We do not recognize them by their appearance, but by their language. They speak the living dead. Three words of Joual, two words of English, a word of French, zero idea. They invade our streets, our stages, our TV series, our songs, our classrooms, our faculties of education, our businesses, even our places of power. Complicated to say something when you don’t speak any language, ask Horacio Arruda. Even worse, if you don’t want to say anything, ask Denis Coderre.
In just a few decades, we will have gone from illiterate French Canadians to functionally illiterate Quebecers. In between, a short episode called Quiet Revolution. The boomers took the opportunity to afford a welfare state full of good times. After having dreamed, sung, celebrated on the mountain, my generation will have transmitted to its descendants only a field of cultural and linguistic ruins.
The government can pass the laws it wants, the one that takes precedence over all the others, it is the law of least effort. Less effort that is rewarded in addition, regardless of the result. Everyone is entitled to their little trophy, their little diploma. We wouldn’t want the thirty mistakes in the dictation to harm the little cherub’s self-esteem.
But if we no longer know how to write, it is enough to know how to count to understand that it will soon be too late. The zombies are already very numerous, and I checked on Google Translate, the undead is not listed there.