“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
If you’re not frightened, you should be, at least so much as fear will spur you to resistance. You too can feel it, right? The sense of an ending, of not ever going back, of normalcy being not redefined or amended, but of normalcy itself being thrown into a rubbish pit. It’s not just me out here in some lonely atom of the country watching us prepare to commit […]
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A scene from Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland in 1976 was an early exhibit of a first world country that had been torn into factions by Protestant bigotry and fear and by a resultant Catholic resistance and fury. The British Army stood at the center. More often than not, because of poor decisions by English politicians and the actions of one terrible day, Bloody Sunday , January of 1972 when paratroopers killed 13 […]
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In June of 1976, the Bi-Centennial year, the year of every ‘Hurrah Hurrah America’ display you can imagine, the summer following my first year teaching, my friend Tony and I hitchhiked out of London to a ferry stop in Wales and on to scrofulous Dublin, across Ireland west and north, to another ferry ride, complete with Orange Day riot, to Scotland where it rained and rained, to the far north […]
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I’ve run through a long list of words searching for one that best describes my first year of teaching, discarding some as too dramatic, others as too mild, a few as wildly inappropriate. It was a confounding year. Look at the definition: “causing surprise and confusion; mixing up (something) with something else so that the individual elements become difficult to distinguish.” Make it a dream. You’ve been assigned to […]
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