Germany’s interior minister told Bild that overnight, police had prevented “violence like that seen in Paris.” I like the grammar of that. Paris is no longer a place in the sentence. It’s a category, like “Watergate” or “a Katrina,” a thing a minister can say his country avoided. He said it the morning after Frankfurt shops were looted and water cannon were out in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg, so the avoiding was partial.

The organizers call themselves Gen Z regelt, roughly “Gen Z takes charge,” and their list is worth reading slowly: school underfunding, cost of living, spending cuts, military service. The first three are the French grievances too. The fourth is more German. Young people are being asked to pay for things and also possibly to serve, and nobody has explained what the payment buys.

I went back through the month and the list of places is long. Spanish housing protests, French lycées, Albania, Portugal, Italy, Serbia, where the student list actually beat Vučić at the ballot. Now Germany. In India, tens of thousands filled Ramlila Maidan yesterday chanting “vote thief,” which is a different grievance in a very different system, though the crowd is the same age and just as irritated.

No single cause explains all of these, and I distrust any story that tries. What they share is a generation noticing that the bills arrive on schedule and the services don’t.

Meanwhile Oleshky’s evacuees are telling reporters “we came back from hell.” Hard to compare, and I won’t.

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