I am preparing to go, with my whole family this time, to both the Republic and the North in April. The news on Northern Ireland continues to be troubling, with Brexit looming and threatening to create in the land--as poet Nick Laird points out in the most recent New York Review of Books--a place with two hard borders, a Northern Ireland that is neither connected to the Republic nor to the United Kingdom.
We began teaching the Troubles in our Facing History classes at New Haven Academy because we were intrigued by a place where thirty years of war in the streets seemed to be resolved in a satisfying manner through negotiation, through political means. But history continues to move on, and no peace is ever guaranteed forever. In that same Nick Laird article, the poet sees what defined Northern Ireland in the Troubles (identity politics boiled up to the point of tit for tat violence) as having now infected the entire world that we live in today. How could Northern Ireland possibly escape what has enveloped everywhere else?
In teaching about the Holocaust, about South Africa and about the Troubles, we as teachers were trying to shine a light on warning signs from history. But when the Trump administration came in, with Steve Bannon's and Stephen Miller's Us and Them strategizing, all these frightening signals out of history were suddenly much closer to our door step.
There is a greater urgency now than at any other point in my lifetime to teach peace. We need to understand how to live together as one human family. In this holiday season full of anti-semitic violence in my own country, and with Brexit facing much less political resistance since Boris Johnson's win, I am wondering how well the Unionists and the Nationalists will hold on to their fragile peace as the UK, led by this upper class Prime Minister who really couldn't care less, separates from Europe.
I enclose a link to a video of a story I tell about our Derry/Londonderry tour guide Gleann (who took the photo of me and Dave Senderoff that you see at the top of this blog post). I think Gleann's story illustrates the feeling of fragile peace that exists in that city: Gleann's Story
