Derry, Northern Ireland

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

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

It creaks...

...but I keep the movement on POS going forward by reminding myself I'm just laying down the framework for some brilliant rewriting later. You may snark now.

Still...I have nearly 43,000 words and have almost connected two main sections that once were miles apart. And I'm establishing the trips to Grianan Aileach and the October 5th march that was such a disaster, not so much for the marchers as for the idiots on the RUC who tried to stop it. You can make the case that the troubles really started then, nearly a year before the Battle of Bogside, because after this came a sit down protest in the middle of Derry where 15,000 people shut the city down completely and then the People's Democracy March in January that lead to the attack at Burntollett Bridge, and then the floodgates opened.

It amazes me how blind people can be to what they're doing. The Protestant establishment in NI wanted to work with the Catholic civil rights groups to improve the lot of Catholics in the city in increments, but the radical right wing lead by Ian Paisley refused to even think of it. They felt that if they were mean enough to the people pushing for equal rights, they'd be able to force them to shut up. And they were so full of their idea of being right, they pulled their crap in front of news cameras and suddenly the whole world was seeing just how diseased those people were.

It's happening here, too, right now. The Tea Party and the evangelicals in the GOP have made it impossible for anyone to even think of compromising with the Democrats. To get ahead in the Republican Party, today, you have to reject science, disparage education, cut taxes for billionaires while cutting services for the poor, ignore facts, and embrace an ideology of denial and covert racism. Newt Gingrich has the script down pat because he's been at it for decades; Romney is just coming across as two-faced because he doesn't believe a thing he's saying, at all, ever, and it's so damned obvious, it's ridiculous. But one of these two sleazebags is going to be the GOP nominee, and normally I'd be gleeful at the prospect only I really do not like Obama's two-faced crap, either.

My hope is we don't descend into the same violence and chaos that gripped Northern Ireland for 30 years...but it's possible. We've already seen outbreaks of it, where a Democratic Congresswoman was shot and 6 others killed, and they were only the latest casualties in the war on human rights by the right wing nuts.

If Obama wins in November...and thanks to the stupidity of the GOP establishment, that's looking more and more likely...I wouldn't be surprised to see even more violence like that show up, all of it directed at liberals and those who care about people and education and opportunity for all instead of just rich, white folk.

I don't like guns, but I have to admit, I'm thinking seriously of getting one and learning how to use it.

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