About the links I posted yesterday.
People ask me if I would ever move back to America to live permanently. The answer is: probably not.
Why?
Well, because the place is terrifying. It’s flow from conservative to liberal and back again with no middle ground and very little notice scares the shit out of me.
Living in Northern Ireland is steady. We are a conservative, Christian country where people still throw petrol bombs.
Yeah. It can be physically scary. But politically? It’s going nowhere.
Abortion is illegal. It always will be.
We had to put my son’s religion on his school application, even though his school is integrated and we don’t, technically, have a religion. That field on the app will never disappear.
Northern Ireland isn’t going to suddenly become non-sectarian. It will matter, for centuries, if not forever, what religion you are, even if you have friends on both sides of the Peace Line. People care.
What Wendy Davis did was amazing. She stood up to the rich white majority of probably the richest whitest state in the union. And she won. And she continues to win as the Governer fires silos of hate at her.
Something similar will never happen here. Not in my lifetime. Not in my son’s. Even though we do have female politicians.
And as much as I hate a lot of stuff here, as much as it goes against my feminist ideals and my own wants and needs, it’s sort of comforting. The lack of change, the knowledge that it will always matter what religion you are or in what part of Belfast you live.
I hate change. And I’ve found the perfect country to live in to never have to worry about things changing.
This all probably sounds defeated and cynical and probably a cop out.
It all probably is.
Feel free to prove me wrong Northern Ireland. I’d be happy to eat my words.
But I am still not moving back to the US any time soon.
That place terrifies me.
Frankly, it terrifies the crap out of me too.
I think you may be wrong about Northern Ireland. It has already accomplished change on a scale rarely seen on the planet. An 800 year old war that makes the Isreal/Palestine thing seem like a minor local skirmish is, to all intents and purposes, over. Yeah, the walls are still there, the sectarianism is still raw, the odd bomb gets thrown, but your son and his classmates will grow up thinking this is the stuff of the past. A couple of generations of kids doing what kids do, looking out into the world instead of at the tiny distinctions that differentiate them from their neighbours, and it really will be left in the past. Change will come and it will be good. Paisley Junior appeared on Question Time a few weeks back and his demeanour when challenged on equal marriage marked him down as an antiquated and frightened buffoon.
I don’t blame you for thinking that a less than perfect Belfast is greatly preferable to the States in its current incarnation. I would take the relative security of the known quantity too. America is terrifying – an empire in rapid and terminal decline and currently held to ransom by nefarious conservative interests, but that too is changing…I believe the days of the angry old white man are coming to an end…
As I said, I will be happy to eat my words.
It’s hard to do though when one of your son’s classmate’s mothers is not sleeping, not because of her newborn baby but because her house was hit with petrol bomb the night before.
That’s not in the past. Well, last week. But not the distant past.