'Trouble' Returns to Northern Ireland. BBC World News reports today that Protestant militants have been rioting and firing upon police vehicles for two days because they feel isolated from society, a society that is working for reconciliation on all sides. Last nite, 32 police officers were injured, and a bus was hijacked and burned — after the passengers were robbed! That passes for protest among the Protestants of Northern Ireland. These people are called "loyalists" (loyal to Britain). How "loyal" are people who take up arms against their government over something so trivial as a parade route being changed? What kind of bargain for Britain is occupation of Northern Ireland?
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Oh, I've heard Brits argue that Britain would like to withdraw but feels morally obligated to stay because a bloodbath would ensue if British force was removed. Protestants would jump to make war against Catholics, and Catholics would then fight back in a brutal civil war. I don't believe it for an instant. Britain has never gladly withdrawn from its colonies but always did so only under intense, even military, pressure. And the UN could certainly replace British force with international peacekeepers to assist Ireland in making the transition from division to union.
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There are always some people who refuse to accept (mere) equality because that would mean they lose their traditional privilege. Tuf. The British government must crack down on criminals who shoot at police, burn vehicles, and riot hour after hour not to protest injustice but to protest prospective justice. Real justice for Ireland requires that Britain withdraw from its last major colony, and evacuate to the British mainland those "loyalists" that will not live in peace and equality with their neighbors in an island-wide Republic of Ireland.
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Synagogs Yes, Housing No. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has, curiously, entailed tearing down housing so Palestinians cannot live as well as Israelis did, but leaving synagogs standing! Of course, they're not really synagogs anymore, since all the religious paraphernalia (scrolls and such) have been removed, but Israelis plainly want to watch Palestinians tear down Jewish "holy places", presumably not just to save themselves indignation at Jews tearing down synagogs but also to maintain Israeli hatred of Arabs.
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Two can play such games. Arabs should convert all the synagogs left standing into mosques and churches instead, obliterating every Jewish symbol with Moslem or Christian symbols and showing thereby that the newer, and better, religions of the wide world have replaced the nasty old cult of the few.
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9/11, Four Years After. Four years ago today I was awake unusually early (because I had been pretty much immobile for the bulk of the prior 36 hours due to a serious injury occasioned by a fall from a ladder), waiting for Live with Regis and [alas] Kelly to come onto Channel 7, ABC's New York City station. Suddenly, regular programming was interrupted by a Special Report about a plane having struck and lodged in one of the World Trade Center's towers. I was a little irritated that the coverage of what then appeared to be a simple accident of strictly local Downtown Manhattan importance went over into Regis's time. None of us yet knew it was no accident, nor that, as I watched, still waiting impatiently for Regis, another plane would smash into the other tower and reveal an astonishing terrorist attack.
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I watched the scarcely believable events unfolding before the cameras of the world's media capital — one reason New York was targeted — more with astonishment than with horror, as the towers, first one, then the other, collapsed into themselves in a rush of smoke and dust.
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After the second plane crash, I think it was, I called my mother to ask if she was watching TV. I don't recall if she was, but she did then for sure, and we stayed on the line as the buildings fell. During our conversation in uneventful moments, she found out about my accident, and she and my older sister insisted I had to go to the hospital. Bad day to find a hospital in this area. We found that the closest hospital, UMDNJ in the University Heights section of my city, Newark, was absolutely unavailable to anything but WTC wounded being brought in by ambulance and Medevac helicopters, but found a smaller, Catholic hospital in the Ironbound, a few miles closer to New York.
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I have mentioned here, on an earlier occasion, that as we drove around a bend of South Orange Avenue, we saw the huge mass of brown smoke above the skyline of Manhattan in the distance, then a helicopter landing on the roof of UMDNJ. While waiting for evaluation at the emergency room of Saint James, we watched further developments on the TV in the waiting room, and the admissions nurse said he was sure that no matter how bad my knee might be, he was sure I was glad to be in Saint James rather than at the World Trade Center.
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I did not lose to the disaster anyone I knew well, but life even as far north as Greenwich Village was adversely affected for months afterward. For me personally, then, the main remaining significance of 9/11 is that it allows me to remember when my right knee was permanently damaged: two days before the worst human attack upon the United States in our history.
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Now we see in the Gulf of Mexico how relatively powerless, little people are as against a great force of nature. But 9/11 was bad enuf.
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Alas, whereas we may have learned something from the Katrina disaster — you don't let people build or even add to a city beneath sea level — we seem not to have learned a thing from 9/11, but continue to talk about ourselves as 'innocent victims' who 'did nothing to provoke this attack'. I wish that were true. It's not.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is .)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:26 PM