Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Sunday, January 13, 2019

APoS continues...

I'm currently working on the Battle of the Bogside in August 1969 and the Celebration Fleadh that followed a couple weeks later. It's where Brendan and Joanna finally truly connect, because she's Protestant but sneaks into the festival and is caught out so he has to protect her and get her home. It's an important point in the story...so I'm taking my time with it...

I've brought in new characters, as well, who may turn out to be important, later. I don't know yet. But this is also the point where the IRA was seen as cowardly in the face of what happened, and members broke off to form the Provisional IRA...and Real IRA and on and on. There was no real need for them, at this point, since British troops were seen as protecting Catholics from the Protestants. That didn't start shifting till much later.

It's funny, but with all this talk of a wall along the Mexican border intending to keep out the hoards of illegal immigrants storming up from Central America, it brings to mind how the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is only about 310 miles long, not nearly 2000 miles. It was heavily guarded by Great Britain, a major military power, and supposedly shut down by non-stop ground and air patrols and guard stations and the like, but it remained as porous as if there were no troops along it, at all.

1240 miles of the US/Mexico border is the Rio Grande, from El Paso to Brownsville. You can't build a wall down the middle of a river, not even one as casual as this one is, so that means building it up off the immediate banks, since those can shift a lot in occasional flooding. Which means the US Government would not only have to seize land from private individuals to build upon, it would effectively be ceding all of the river and a fair portion of Texas back to Mexico. I cannot imagine that going over well in Austin.

The stupidity of the idea that you can even close a border keeps getting proven over and over -- Berlin, The Iron Curtain, the Maginot Line...even the Great Wall of China was not completely effective. It did keep semi-nomadic invaders out, but did not stop some large scale invasions, and even the nomadic people were able to breach the wall from time to time.

The stupidity of humanity is not to be underestimated...

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