In tolerating the intolerable, one accepts the unacceptable

As a modest follow-up to Pastorius' article on the statements from the despairing French police union, I offer the following statistics about the war on the garbage collectors of Paris.

The French Christian conservative blog Le Salon Beige reported Wednesday that there have been 130 assaults on Parisian garbage collectors so far this year. Garbage collectors now pick up trash under the watchful eyes of a police escort, such is the degree of danger in some Paris neighborhoods.
French officials are coy about identifying just which parts of the city are actually the most dangerous for their employees.
I wonder if their reticence is prompted by who might live there..?
[my translation follows:]

“Since May 2005, the garbage collectors of the city of Paris have been obliged to work under police protection in one neighborhood of the XVIIIth municipal borough ["arrondissement"]
…
This police accompaniment was decided following several violent incidents targeting the garbagemen, said Yves Contassot, Green adjunct to the mayor, in charge of the Environment and sanitation.
Mr Contassot refused to name the neighborhood, while specifying that since the beginning of the year the city’s garbage collecting personnel have been the target of 130 “assaults” throughout Paris, ranging from “forceful insults to physical assault”, with around thirty cases [originating] from the same XVIIIth municipal borough.”

A laconic commentor at the Salon Beige blog sums up the inevitable results of France's passivity in trying to wish problems away:
“In tolerating the intolerable, one accepts the unacceptable”.

Tellingly, much of the frustration expressed by both the "youth" riots, and incidents such as this assault on garbagemen, centers around how hard it is to keep adapting to the increasingly awful conditions... rather than finding ways of actually reducing (or, dare we dream, eliminating) these awful conditions.