I am now catching up furiously on blog posts, to prove that I don't just photos to Facebook and that I can procrastinate effectively. Look out! All the trees of the field will clap their hands and dance in joy. By that, I mean I'm listening to the Zombies, and not dorking out. At all.

Belfast
February 1, 2008

For some random reason, I had a line of poetry stuck in my head the whole trip: "this is a good country/there is no war here". I'm pretty sure it's Kenneth Patchen, but I can't detail any more of the poem, or even think of what it could be from. It was a thoroughly appropriate quote to have ringing between my ears through the day, because I am from a good country, and there is no war there. There is no war in the way there was a war in Belfast, or in Derry.

College students complain that no one takes us seriously, recognizes our committment to the democratic process or the world around us, but I don't know. Seeing the bullet holes, the flags, the murals, there's something that the kids of Belfast have experience, the boys and girls of Berlin, of Croatia, that as an American, I can't fully understand. It's a different sort of relevance.

True, in our current state, three or four dead on a weekend barely make the news. But we are so much bigger, and so less personal, and they are not dying in our streets and pubs, not the way they did there.

It's amazing, because I didn't really expect to see as many murals as we did. But it's true that once you drive down a Loyalist or a Republican sector, and you're suddenly hit with a thousand tiny (or in the case of murals, HUGE) reminders of who exactly you're not.

Labels: belfast, northern ireland, photos