We went to Scotland and Ireland! American tourists talking religion and politics.

041.mp3 (58m 26MB)

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Welcome to Jay Flaunce’s Ignorance. This is episode number 41. So, my father and mother and brother and I went to Scotland. We went for a clan reunion, a Hanne clan family reunion, and did a bunch of tourism things. And so, this episode has several different snippets. There’s kind of three parts here. The first part is just on airplanes on the way there. The second part is when we’re kind of in the middle of our trip. And the third part is after we were in Belfast and we’re exploring tourism of the Troubles. So, there’s some religion talk in here, and there’s a lot of politics talk in here, and there’s the Troubles and Northern Ireland around the Belfast region, and all kinds of interesting thoughts. So, I hope you enjoy the episode. Mister, where are we heading? Where are we? We are now in Chicago, we’re here at International Airport. And in about an hour and a half, we’re going to take off and head for London. What are we doing in London? Well, maybe we’re laying over so we can fly into Glasgow, Scotland. What’s in Glasgow? Oh my gosh, I’ve been researching stuff for weeks. There are so many. Oh, and did you say in Glasgow? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, there’s about a dozen things that I was kind of interested in, both in Glasgow and in Edinburgh, as well as the area we’re going to be visiting with the NA Reunion in the southern part of Scotland. And then some really cool stuff when we get over to Ireland and Belgrade and… Belfast? Yeah, excuse me. Belfast and Dublin. Those places have some really cool things, it sounds like, to do. That’s on the agenda, maybe. We’re going to have to take a family boat or something. I was impressed by how many books you had of tourism in that area. I don’t know how much of that stuff you brought with you, but it looked like you had been doing some serious research. I have. Well, kind of a synopsis of it I have in a four-page handout, but then I actually brought the books, too. The maps and all the other info about hours and where’s the cheap food and the expensive food and all that stuff. Oh, you did bring the books. I did bring those books. Three of them, actually. But not the Hanna Asorba? Not the Hanna Asorba thing, because I didn’t think it added much to the occasion. I’ve got a bunch of Hanna genealogy stuff to tell you about the Hanna ancestry, and then our specific family thing. It’s kind of a little crib sheet that has a shortened version of that that you can carry around in your pocket. So when you’re at the reunion, they say, well, which of the Hanna’s are you involved with? Well, you can say, well, Alexander is the one that came to Ireland, and then Thomas is the one that came to the United States, and has the birthdates and years and all that stuff. A little crib sheet. So that book that you’ve got, the Hanna Clan of Scotland or whatever. Yeah, Sorbet. Hanna’s of Sorbet. It’s two inches thick of all Hanna’s, Hanna’s, Hanna’s. And we’re not in that. I didn’t see it. So they must mention thousands of people in there, but not our people? Not our people. Whole different branches. But the reunion that we’re going to, did we track into there? Did they not list a bunch of genealogy to trace? Like the website just says, hey, look, if your last name is any of these, feel free to show up. That’s what it says. Right. So it’s a little tricky because the genealogist, Keith Hanna, sent me this information that it listed about 12 names that might be a connectivity. And there’s one Hugh Hanna, which it would be about a generation off of the Hugh Hanna that we’re kind of tracking down through. So it’s possible that that’s the link. But we actually made some assumptions, which I’m not sure are 100%, but they’re pretty accurate, I think. How seriously have the reunion people assembled the genealogy? Like hardcore genealogists or not really? Well, the big old fat book is kind of a collection of a whole bunch of their work and everything. And Keith is the genealogist for the Hanna clan. Did he write that book or someone he knows wrote that book? I don’t know about that. He didn’t write it, but I’m not sure. So I don’t know. We’ll see when we get there. I’m hoping maybe I’ll run into somebody that’s kind of traced their family origins to ours. But we’ll see. To me, chronologically it fits together, but I’m not sure. Maybe we’ve gone down a blind alley somewhere. I’m looking forward to the train ride. I think that’s going to be really cool. Oh my gosh, yeah, that’s going to be really cool. And you’ll get a second train ride. Lucky you. Yeah, apparently. I have an impromptu train ride. Three hour train ride. You’ll see lots of pretty country. Yeah, twice. Going and coming, right. And then train back and then… It’ll be a different route though, so you’ll see different things, right? Well, the train line is like very coastal. Right. And it looked like the road goes inland more. Right. You want to allow a couple hours for all the sheep herders and stuff like that. Probably if it says it’s 55 miles, it could take you two hours to do it. Because the roads are narrow and you have all kinds of impediments sometimes. Even the main one along the coast there? No, the one along the coast. That’s a train route and a car route, both. I don’t know. I figured that main drag south to… That place. I figured that was a fairly highway-ish thing. Okay, with the train running alongside it. Well, parts of it, yeah. But sometimes the train is way off in the sticks compared to where the road is. Right. I don’t think they laid the train route along where the road is. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Yeah. Well, we’re just going to learn a lot in a short amount of time. What’s it called? The southern, northern highland? So the train route we’re taking north out of… Where are we going? Well, that’s out of Glasgow. Okay, so Glasgow north. It doesn’t go all that far north. We’re not really going to ever be in the highlands. The highlands are the northernmost part of… It’s kind of like Canada and the United States, you know. Canada is the northernmost part and the United States is the lower part. So we won’t actually see the highlands. We’re all… Our family are what they call lowland Scots. And then they became Irish as well, so then the Scots-Irish. And that’s a particular ethnic group, which a lot of whom ended up in the Appalachians. And so all the things you hear about the Appalachians, a lot of their culture, actually the music and the Hatfield-McCoy conflicts, that sort of stuff is patently Scottish-Irish, Scotch-Irish. And so it’s had quite an influence. Well, I thought the highlands was referring to the fact that it’s mountainous, not the fact that it’s northernous. So yeah, the mountains are north mostly. Right. But I thought as soon as you got northwest of Glasgow, and you started hitting the mountains, what they call mountains, you know, the hills. Yeah. But as soon as you start hitting those, I thought those were the highlands. Like I thought, oh, okay, that’s highlands because now you’re in the… Well, maybe our train, you know, maybe our little train thing goes through the highlands. That’s what I’m saying. Perhaps. I hope I’m right. They call it the highlands. Oh, do they? I thought. I thought it was just the northernmost part because I’ve always… You know, they make a distinction between the highland clearance. That was a time when the northern Scottish people were driven out. And then they had like the Irish clearance, which was when the northern Irish were sort of driven out. Oh, pizza has arrived. So there’s one pepperoni and red onion, which is not this one. This is chicken and beau. All right, chicken and tomatoes. There’s the pepperoni red onion. And this one is sausage. And there are three pizzas, each cut into four slices, which means everybody can have one sample of each type. Are you recording me? Wow. Go ahead, Brad. Hey lady, where are we going? We’re going to London. Why? Because it’s the next step to Scotland, Ireland. The Hanay clan reunion. So today, June 1st, 2023, we’re going to take a bus to the Giant’s Causeway. And the rough guide to Ireland says this about the Giant’s Causeway. Ever since 1693, when the Royal Society first published it as one of the great wonders of the natural world, the Giant’s Causeway has been a major tourist attraction. The highly romanticized pictures of the polygonal basalt rock formations by the Dubliner Susanna Drury, which circulated throughout Europe in the 18th century, did much to popularize the causeway. Two of them are now on show in the Ulster Museum in Belfast. Not everyone was impressed, though. A disappointed William Thackeray commented, I’ve traveled 150 miles to see that? And he especially disliked the tourist promotion of the causeway, claiming in 1842 that, quote, The traveler no sooner issues from the inn by a back door when he is informed which will lead straight to the causeway than the guides pounce upon him. End quote. Although the tourist hype is today less overtly mercenary, the causeway, now managed by the National Trust, still attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. Indeed, the site can get crushingly busy, which can really put a damper on the visit. So you do well to visit as early or as late in the day as you can. For sheer otherworldliness, the causeway can’t be beaten. Made up of an estimated 37,000 black basalt columns, each a polygon. Hexagons are by far the most common, with pentagons second, though sometimes the columns have as many as ten sides. The site is the result of a subterranean explosion some 60 million years ago that stretched from the causeway to Rathlin and beyond to Islay, Staffa, and the Mole in Scotland. A huge mass of molten basalt was spewed onto the surface, which, on cooling, solidified into what are essentially crystals. According to mythology, the giant of the causeway was Ulster warrior Fionn McComhalai, also known as Finn McCool, and two legends of Fionn’s exploits provide an entertaining alternative to geological explanations of the causeway’s origins. In one, Fionn became besotted with a woman giant who resided on the Scottish island of Staffa, where the causeway’s fault line resurfaces, and constructed a highway across the sea by which he could travel to Wooher. The alternate version of the story suggests that Fionn built the causeway in order to head over to Scotland to give another giant a good kicking, but when confronted by the enemy’s superior size, fled back to Ireland and hid in an extra-large cot, which he had persuaded his wife to construct. When the pursuing Scottish giant arrived, he took just a glance at the sheer size of Fionn’s supposedly baby and fled back to Scotland. All right. So depending on whether you want a scientific geological explanation, or a much more exciting narrative of imagination. Yeah, well, it sounds like he had his wife make a cot, which confused the other giant, making him think that, oh my gosh, if you had a baby that big, this giant must be really giant. He must be titanic. And then he fled back to Scotland. That’s the story, I guess. Yeah, yeah, there were giants. Yeah, exactly. An alternative version of the story suggests that Fionn built the causeway in order to head over to Scotland And these giants aren’t like big humans. These giants are mythological creatures that aren’t human at all, right? I guess so. I think that’s the idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess so. I think that’s the idea. That could maybe be a countering Like we go from 945 to four o’clock, right? So can’t be all driving. I’ll be an adventure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You really tripped my trigger there because yeah, I do not in any way consider myself subject to the divine. I consider myself actually a manifestation of the divine. Well, because you believe you have a personal relationship with God and no one can, no one, no other human being can tell you what God wants for you, correct? Or do you think other human beings can tell you what God wants for you? I think I can learn something about what God might want for me from other people, but I guess the whole thing, I have a real problem with the whole idea like of the crown as you know, the whole royalty thing I think is just ludicrous really. So I don’t think of myself as a subject to God. I think of myself as in relationship with God. I think of, you know, as I’m working on my theology, I actually think of myself as a manifestation of God. And so it’s, to me, so to me, there’s not a big distinction. Like there’s me over here and then there’s God over here. That’s where a lot of the problems I think you deal with in relationship to God come from is because you think there’s a God out there somewhere who’s using to, I think there’s a God out there somewhere? Well if you were to, what you have rejected is the version of a God out there somewhere who either is in control or isn’t in control, but if he is in control, you’re ticked off because he’s allowing all this suffering to go on. And if he isn’t in control, what the heck good is he anyway? So forget it. I’m not going to be messing around with a God like that one way or another, either of those options. So screw him. That is correct. That is exactly how it is. That’s right. That’s good that you can state my take on it. Yeah. So here’s my take on all that. My take on all that is that way back when, there was this thing called the Big Bang. And this Big Bang is this energetic force which has been moving forward for billions of years and has now manifested itself as the cosmos as we now know it, and the Earth in particular, and you and I in more particular. And so I think that that energetic force is inseparable from us. It really is us. We are it. It is we. When God said to Moses, when he said, well I tell people who sent me, the account says that God said, just tell them, I Am has sent you. I Am. And as I explore what that means, I Am, I keep thinking, well yeah, I Am too. So it sounds kind of funny to put into words, but I think there’s an inseparability between, you have a God, your view of God, if there was even such a God, would be out there somewhere. And my view of God, which I believe there is, is just this energetic force which is evolving and becoming ever more complex, ever more beautiful, ever more awesome, and all that stuff. And it’s ongoing. And I don’t think that God even knows what the future brings. I think it’s still unfolding. It’s still expanding and creating new and novel expressions. I don’t see, in my head, any difference between subjugating yourself to royalty, or subjugating yourself to mechanisms of capitalism, or subjugating yourself to any earthly authority that tells you what, there is a God out there and this is what he wants you to do, and this is how you need to live your life because I said so, and because my interpretation of this book says so, or whatever. Like all of those things, to me, sound like the same thing. You’re either subjugating yourself in the name of the crown, or in the name of God, or in the name of the almighty dollar, or in the name of the US military, or in the name of the British military under, you know, the crown, or in the name of, you know, whatever. Like, whatever it is.

What you think is right, regardless of what you think, all of that to me is the same bucket of stuff. When we look at the Orange Museum yesterday, and we look at a feverish devotion to a line of human beings, because those, and I don’t even know why, like I don’t even understand, you gotta back way up and explain it, because I was staring at the beginning, what they consider the beginning of the Orange Revolution or whatever, and I took pictures of all of the paragraphs of stuff on the wall, because I couldn’t process it, and I took pictures of it so I could try to figure it out later, like try to understand what’s going on, anyway, I don’t see the difference in all of those things, at all, like I don’t get it. And you, when I was trying to say that yesterday, you rejected that completely, and I didn’t understand why we’re not on the same page, because everything you said just now, sounds like we are on the same page, in my brain, so maybe I’m just missing something. Yeah, well, a couple thoughts. One is that I think in our everyday life, we subjugate ourselves to our culture, we subjugate ourselves to the wishes or needs of other people, we subjugate ourselves to all kinds of things, just to get through the day, we subjugate ourselves to the traffic laws, and stuff like that. No, we voluntarily choose to cooperate with these systems, because it makes our lives easier. Yeah. That’s different. Voluntarily choosing to do something is totally different from subjugating yourself, in my mind. In my mind, one of them is saying, that’s the authority, they’re right, so to the extent that I’m doing what they want me to do, that’s that I’m doing the right thing. The other one is, I’m choosing to cooperate with this traffic system, with this social system, with this social company, with this social whatever, I’m choosing to cooperate because it makes their lives better, it makes my life better, everybody’s better, why wouldn’t I do that? Of course, we’re cooperative creatures. Yeah. But to me, those are two different things. When you use the term subjugation, is there also a subtle recognition that if you refuse subjugation to whatever those entities are, that there’s punishment involved, that the entity which is seeking subjugation accompanies the refusal of subjugation with punishment? Yeah, that’s what makes it real. If there are no consequences for not behaving in accordance with the authority, then does it really exist? Well, barely. Because you can just change your mind whenever, and if you can just change your mind whenever, if the system has no teeth, like no teeth at all, then I don’t consider that subjugation. Right. But just because you’re choosing to do that, there are no consequences to choosing the opposite. Right. And so I don’t understand, like the mentality, I understand psychologically the mentality of I’m on team Clan Hanay, and if that means we’re going to war, we’re going to war. I understand that psychologically. But strategically, if you’re trying to decide how you want to live your life, that road, that infinite number of roads you could go down, you know, othering people that aren’t in your clique or clan or social group or coffee group or book club or anything, like it doesn’t matter what it is. I mean, so when you join the military, or you take a civil service job and you swear in the test to uphold the laws of the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or you become a police officer or you whatever, you’re signing into a set of things, set of principles, right? Like legal principles or whatever. Okay, we got to go to the transcontinent. All right. Bye. Clicker clicker. Why won’t it stop recording? It was incredible. Okay, so let me get my little note card here. I recorded this, that, and the other thing. Yay, a blonde! Let’s hear it for dad, folks. So you want me to do a recap? So okay, so we meet a guy and he’s like, hey, let’s go on a 45 minute tour. And what we did is we drove not far from here. It’s just like a mile up towards Northwest Belfast. And he stops for the first set of murals and he lets us out and he walks us through a bunch of stuff and shows us whatever and shows us that here’s the neighborhoods where all the trouble started in 1976 and here’s what the local police force did and here’s all the military and my family got firebombed basically almost out of our house when the local police force rolled in. So he is, he was raised Roman Catholic and he’s on one side of the division and the Loyalist Protestants, Loyalist to the crown, England, UK, right? But this is, this is all before, no wait, Ireland, Northern Ireland split in 1912, right? So this is 1976, so this is when the violence erupted again after the division of the two countries. So so far, Belfast wasn’t split up. They didn’t have the big peace walls up, they didn’t have bombings going on on both sides and all this stuff. Anyway, so we go up there and through a series of stops, he’s showing us all of the physical infrastructure that’s still in place today. These gates that are going to be closed at 7 p.m. tonight where there’s a gate on this side and there’s a gate on this side and there’s like a DMZ where no one’s there after 7 p.m., no one’s in that barbed wire section. By the gate? Yep. And they’re just cameras. So the police force that is on both sides, apparently the police force that rolls around in these little armored cars in that area that are bulletproof, they roll around and for like petty crimes, both sides apparently are happy to call that local police force today in 2023. And those police show up, same police, both sides. And officially, everything is disarmed since the 90s, you know, the Good Friday Agreement and all this stuff. Everybody’s disarmed. The guns are all illegal. But the organized crime of the region through the UVF, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which is the Northern Ireland, well, yeah, so the loyalist side. So the IRA and the UVF are on different sides of this problem for decades, right? And they’re both officially, they don’t exist officially. But there’s murals and there are young people on both sides that are just looking to brawl and he says that they don’t even, Jimmy says they don’t even know really what they’re fighting about because they don’t really understand the history of what happened. They just are young people disillusioned with whatever that are looking for a fight. And the reason that tonight, again tonight, all those gates are going to close is just to keep them from having an organizing point where they meet to fight, basically. So that they’re not stabbing each other, killing each other, firebombing or throwing rocks or whatever. It’s just safer for everyone in both communities if those gates just close at 7 p.m. So they do, you know, well, tonight, every night, anyway. So we do this tour and he’s talking through all the history of all these, you know, heroes on both sides. And you see, so I’m, my personal politics very much align with the Southern Ireland IRA, in air quotes, stance where they’re pro-LGBTQ and they’re really worried about how Israel is treating Palestine and they’re really worried about apartheid in South Africa not being fair to black people and they’re, you know, they’re very, you know, what in America we would call leftist socialist, you know, politics of the oppressed masses and systems of oppression, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, would be my take on that one. So anyway, so the murals on the one side are global and they’re anti-Israel, you know, which is in the, if I had to pick a side, I would be anti-Israel, right? I’m very worried that the Palestinian people are, you know, blah, blah, blah, anyway. Pro-Palestinian might be a better way to put it. Right. But the way to be pro-Palestinian is to resist, right? You know, and America is still dumping $30 billion a year or whatever at Israel. Anyway, that’s just my personal, okay. So then you cross the border and suddenly it’s all about King Charles and it’s all about, you know, loyalty to the crown and it’s British, and I’m literally across the border of murals, but now it’s loyalist, crown loyalist Northern Ireland. Big murals of Charles, you know, the new king of England and I took a picture that has at least, I would say, 50 Union Jack flags that are all in one image, you know, as I shot down the street, you know, so this is the, we’re approaching the high time in July, there’s some date in July, it’s kind of like our 4th of July, I guess, for the British, where they really celebrate. It’s a whole marching season. So there’s 4,500 marches, he said, every year. Right. For several months, they just march like crazy, like, count only four months out of the year, the nice months of the year, I guess. Celebrating their connections to Britain, the monarchy. Oh, yeah. They’re loyalists. And that’s what that panel in the Orange Society was about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’re kind of the far right, I think, of that loyalism, you know. So now we’re on that side. So the mural is now pro-Israel, it’s we will fight with you, Israel, because, you know, the Palestinians are launching rockets at us and that’s bad, which it is, it is bad, I get it. But I’m worried about the Palestinian people far more than, you know, pro-Israeli, like if you’re blindly pro-Israeli, that’s, you know, a different side of the politics of that spectrum. Anyway, we’re only there for five minutes and a guy walks up to us. Yeah. Named Noel Large. Shakes our hand and just an Irish, yeah, just an Irish guy. Kind of the end of our tour. Yeah. Old guy. Our guys let us say, oh, why don’t you walk down there and take a few pictures of the Union Jackson. For two minutes, literally. He said two minutes. Right. And come back. Well, this guy approached us. He’s wearing a blue hat and he’s, you know, looking very Irish. Actually, he’s wearing a blue and white shirt, which I thought was kind of interesting. But anyway. So, it turns out he’s with the UVF and he’s killed scores of people during the, during the Troubles. Incidentally, during the Troubles, he said that there were, in the 1970s, there were a thousand bombings a year in Ireland. So, this is cafes getting blown up and churches and schools. And his own place, like where he grew up, basically the whole area was decimated. But I guess his home was spared at the time. Yeah. Our tour guide literally lives on the wall. He pointed at it. Yeah. And he said, see that big tree over the wall? That’s my house. So, he lives on the wall, 30-foot separating wall. So, when they finally had the peace accords, what they did was they granted amnesty to fighters on both sides. And so, this guy who probably killed, I mean, literally killed scores of people, Jay looked him up on the internet and he had a 375-year sentence that he would have been serving if it hadn’t been for the peace accords. So, he was let out, as were the people on the other side. Our tour guide was fought with the IRA. So, I’m sure he didn’t go into details, but I’m sure he killed people too. So, basically, they were all on the same side. It’s interesting. He showed pictures of himself, like as at the very beginnings of the Troubles, and then a picture of himself six years later, and it doesn’t even look like the same person. He was kind of youthful, exuberant innocence over here, and then six years later, kind of a hardened, combative kind of a guy. So, it’s kind of one of those deals. It’s interesting to me that one of the major things that he returned to several times was that if they’re ever going to have actually some kind of a united Ireland, like all together united, they’re going to have to integrate the schooling system. So, right now, only 7.5% of the school children go to an integrated school. So, 92.5% of them attend either a Catholic school or a Protestant school, at which point they have no contact with the other side. And he said it’s not mandated by law that it be that way, but the problem is that the way it works is that the schools, which are integrated schools, they’re like distanced away from, you know, like you have to, they’re not like in the center of the population usually. They’re sort of like framed schools, like out in suburbia. Well, then you’ve got a transportation problem where you’re going to walk by all these schools, you’re going to have your kid walk two miles past several schools he could be going to to go to an integrated school. So 7.5%. He said that in the, he also said that there are only 10% of the marriages in Ireland are mixed marriages. So 90% of them are still a Catholic marriage to a Catholic and a Protestant marriage to a Protestant. And that’s just the way things are in life. So the guy on the right in that photo, that’s our tour guide. And the guy on the left, they, both of those guys were trying to kill each other in the 70s. But they knew each other. And I don’t know if you say they’re on friendly terms, but they’re on conversational terms anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, you know, this was a, a tense slash friendly conversation that they had. Is it tense? Can you actually feel the tension? I could. Dad was playing peacemaker. I was amazed that dad asked for a photo. I’m very defensive when I walk into situations where I don’t know people. And dad’s like, oh, let’s get a picture with the two of you. And they agreed. So there you go. There’s a series of photos. Earlier in the tour, we just accidentally ran into his daughter, who’s quite a world traveler and, and all this. The diver’s daughter. And so I said, hey, can I get, you know, she was really affable and very interesting. And so I said, hey, can I get a picture with you? So I thought, oh, well, I’ll take, I’ll take a picture of these two guys. I didn’t know at the time that they actually were, would have killed each other like, like in the 90s. I’ll take a picture of these Hatfields and McCoys. Yeah, that’s right. I ought to send them both a picture, you know. So what’s, was, was there any conversation about what is their sense of the current tension? What’s, what’s the foundation of the current tension? And what’s the sense of whether or not that’s a good thing to be living in? Well that’s what’s kind of a mixed review. So there’s ways in which he feels very optimistic because it’s so much better than what he lived through. You know, in his own lifetime, he’s seen so much improvement. So in that sense, I think he tends to be fairly sanguine, but, but he defines it as better. Yes. You know, it’s, it’s better that we, we who have differing views are not actively combatant with each other. Absolutely. Because he’s seen this and he said several times, I never want to see that for my grandchildren and children and stuff like that, you know, so he doesn’t want to go back to that. Nope. On the one hand, but on the other hand, he was candid to say that there’s a lot of, still a lot of unresolved tension and he identified three or four areas. So it wasn’t just sectarian, you know, like religious, so that’s part of it, but it’s also political and that, of course that brings the whole United Kingdom, Britain thing in there. And then it was also economic, you know, so I think the better paying jobs around here probably for the most part go to people who are the majority, you know, which would be the, the loyalists, the British loyalists and that sort of thing. Because British loyalists tend to be higher income, therefore tend to be captains of industry, therefore tend to be in control of who gets hired and who doesn’t. It used to literally be written in the law that you couldn’t hire a Catholic. Right. That used to literally be the law. That was against the law. You couldn’t marry a Catholic. You couldn’t live here. You couldn’t live in our subsidized housing at all if you were a Catholic. All of that stuff used to be in the law until I forget the name of the thing that he said that changed that. On paper it changed it, but it didn’t actually change it. Bell for agreement or something, yeah. I don’t know if it actually changed it, so how much of that is still going on even though on paper it’s not supposed to be going on, they don’t know. But I would have thought that would have been the reverse. I would have thought it would have been you can’t go, you can’t marry if you’re a Protestant. You can’t do this or that. The Protestants have the power of the crown behind them. Right. UK crown. Here we are in Northern Ireland in Belfast. We’re the UK. They’re the top dogs here. Oh, because of Anglicanism, okay. Because we switched from the state religion of Catholicism to Anglican Church of England. Yeah, that’s part of it, yeah. More simply put, I think it’s like people hire like people. The people that you went to school with, for instance, in your Protestant school, those are the people when you get in a position to hire people, you’re going to go, oh, there’s my buddy Jack. Let’s have him come over here and take the job. I imagine a lot of it’s just informal, you know how that goes. So it’s not an active. They didn’t get the laws changed on paper, right? So you move from a civil rights movement in America into, oh, okay, yeah, you’re technically equal, but now you have Jim Crow, right? So none of that was on paper, but it was still known by everyone and everyone is still segregating. And to this day, they only have 10% intermarried. They call it a mixed marriage. If you’re Catholic and you marry a Protestant or vice versa, they call that a mixed marriage and they track the statistics. And there’s a line.

10% of those ever happen here, right? So it’s still extremely, and then like Dad was saying, kids are educated completely separately. So you are educated from kindergarten in the history of your side of the stuff. He said there’s a book called The Dirty War, which he thinks, I’m asking what would be the best book if you just read one book about all this, that makes sense of it. He said he thought that presented the two sides of the argument quite well. So I’ll probably get that. I’d like to understand a little bit more about what the heck went on here. This wall that went up, which is like a 30 foot wall right through the city, it was supposed to be there like for six months or initially. It’s been there for 53 years. And part of it’s still functional. I mean, well, the wall’s still there altogether, but part of it, they’re still locking and unlocking. It’s still active every night. The gate, you know, just to keep these idiots from. At the time, this was the most militarized zone in the 70s. This was briefly the most militarized, well, not briefly for seven years, the most militarized zone on the planet, except for Vietnam. The Vietnam War was more militarized. Yeah, so even the North South Korea border, which I thought we’ve had 80,000 troops there since the 40s, I thought, but I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what he said. It was, there were tens of thousands of troops here. Yeah, tens of thousands of British troops. Then you had all the loyalists on the one side all armed up. You had 10, 20,000 of them. Then you had 10 to 20,000 of the separatists, if you will. And then a whole bunch of other groups, you know, that just like orange men, I suppose, or whoever, you know, that just armed up. I mean, I was gonna ask him what that total number was when you added all those together. It must’ve been a quarter of a million soldiers if it sounded like running around here all armed and dangerous. And all in uniform? Most of them would have been. So they still have an incidence in organized crime. Like last week, a guy, he was running a taxi cab and everybody knows who he is. He’s the active leader of the UVF. Not officially, he won’t say so, but everyone knows that he’s the Ulster Volunteer Force guy. Anyway, last week, he pistol whipped a guy over a fair. Like they just got in an argument and he nailed him with a pistol. Yeah, I think it’s even weirder than that. I think he was riding in the cab and the guy was, you know, they’re supposed to keep him entertained with stories or something, and he wasn’t telling no stories or something. And I think he pistol whipped him for that, maybe. Oh, I thought he owed him money for drugs, but anyway. But I don’t know. So this stuff is still going on. Right. Now it’s organized crime with the illegal guns. So it’s all illegal. Like you can’t legally be a UVF. You can’t legally organize. They don’t have, quote, freedom of speech, end quote. Like, theoretically, we do, where we can organize and say anything as long as we’re not inciting violence. Like I can say the stupidest shit in the world in a group of my friends, as long as we’re not inciting violence, that’s legal. We can say whatever we wanna say. I think guns here, other than the police, are all illegal, aren’t they? Is that the impression you got? Well, in the countryside, you can have shotguns for hunting, blah, blah, blah, blah. We got that whole, or what was that? They have some. Well, I don’t know about Northern Ireland. We got all that information back in Scotland. Oh, that’s right. So I don’t know about Northern Ireland. We didn’t ask him about the gun control. But he said that some of these criminal elements now, they have automatic and semi-automatic weapons. So that’s a problem. So yeah, I don’t know what to make of the fact that we just threw 60 pounds at a guy who may have killed a bunch of people, and we shook hands with a guy who was convicted 350 years of prison. I don’t even, I assume he didn’t even deny it. He’s like, well, hell yeah. He told you he killed a bunch of people. No, I don’t think our taxi cab. The taxi, to us, he was just an old little Irish guy. With a walking stick in his hand. Was very interested in talking about who’s doing what they’re saying, and who’s embellishing. Talking mostly to our tour guide. And as soon as we drove away, our tour guide’s like, that’s. That’s that guy. So he was, you know, that is literally the head of the, and then he said, and I was the big deal in the IRA at the time. Right, but he didn’t say, and I killed a bunch of people, our IRA, our driver. He didn’t say he did or did not. He didn’t say that, but he didn’t say he didn’t either. So I think it’s safe to assume that he did. Yeah, so there’s. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about this? It’s a moral ambiguity. Well, I guess, like I was mentioning when we were walking away from the tour, there’s a way in which, once war is declared, you can have all the nice Geneva Conventions you want about, you know, protecting civilian life, and only use certain killing techniques, and no chemical weapons, whatever. It’s all kind of a moot point, because once the war is declared, there’s really only two things that the people out there on the front lines primarily care about. They, you know, they may care somewhat about other things, but primarily they care about getting home in one piece and getting home with their buddies in one piece. And whatever it takes to do that, I think all the other things are niceties, but secondary. That’s the nature of war. War is hell. And so I think that this guy, I think, well, when he was talking about the old man with the cane, he mentioned that the reason that old man with the cane was kind of animated in his discussion was because he thought there were lots of these bus drivers, taxi drivers, that were profiting off of the troubles that weren’t part of the troubles. In his mind, unless you were part of the troubles, you shouldn’t be profiting off of it, you know? And so I think that’s why he’s probably okay with talking with our bus driver, because he was a participant, just like he was. Both of them were participants. So I was telling Jay, I don’t feel like I’m in a position to judge really, because I don’t know what I would do under those circumstances. Had I been raised Protestant or Catholic in this setting? Had I seen so many of my friends get killed and my neighborhood razed and so forth? What would you do, you know? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to be morally superior or pretend to be and say, well, I wouldn’t do that no matter what. Well, I don’t know. So there’s a sense in which it starts off philosophical and it degenerates to revenge. I’ll kill you before you kill me. I don’t care if war’s been declared or not. If someone hurts my family, it’s on. It’s revenge. It’s a cycle of revenge. That’s, of course, like Martin Luther King said, that’s the downwards spiral of violence. And if we don’t all learn to live together, we’re all going to die together, especially with nuclear weapons and that sort of stuff. So I think about grandpa in World War II when he was over there trying like hell to kill the Japanese before they killed him until his boat sank. Absolutely. And trying to stop- He was doing everything he could possibly do to kill the Japanese. Trying to stop the world from becoming Nazi Germany. He was going to die. Man, I’m not going to condemn him for that. He was just doing what he thought was right. You know, it would be, there’s no way to know, but it would be interesting to me to know how has the business now of the troubles, so like you guys were talking about, there’s a sense in which the taxi tours of the area that was the central troubles is perpetuating the retelling, retelling, retelling, retelling of that history is in a way perpetuating it. Well, yes, yes and no. I mean, to some extent, for some people, they just may have a period interest in violence and whatever, and so they go, oh, I want to see where someone got their brains blown out, you know? But I think in a larger context, it’s educational. It’s like sensitivity training or whatever. I mean, I definitely walked away from the whole thing thinking, yeah, here’s a guy who was in the worst of the worst and did the worst of the worst, and yet today, he can see that he doesn’t want to go there himself, doesn’t want his children or grandchildren to go there, and he feels like he’s in some ways atoning for what he did, I think, by trying to explain to people, hey, you know, he did at one point. You know, there’s nothing glamorous about war. You know, people glamorize it or whatever, but that’s not what it is. It’s something totally horrific, you know? So there’s these layers that still exist. So there’s the layer of differing opinions about should we be loyal to the crown, should we not? Right, that’s a big one for a lot of people. Yeah, there’s the layer of religious affiliation who’s more right about their representation of the nature of the spiritual realm. Yeah, like in terms of that, he mentioned that some people think the pope is Satan, you know, basically, and the church is an abomination kind of thing. Yeah. There’s the layer of, you know, these horrible things were done to my ancestors, therefore I’m going to avenge my ancestors. Yeah. And probably economic layers about being the dispossessed, you know, for sure, because they actually, when the Brits decided to colonize through the reservations, the Northern Ireland, they basically just did an ethnic cleansing thing. If you didn’t leave, you were killed. That was it. Hey, guess what? Free land, you know? So if you’re Scotch and you’re Presbyterian, or if you’re Scotch and you’re Protestant and English-speaking, come on down, you know, claim your land, and so where does that leave all the indigenous people? Well, either dead or down in Southern Ireland, you know, where they can exist. Yeah, so there’s a huge, it’s very multilayered, yeah. So did he talk at all about, is there a peace force? Are there groups that are actively trying to build bridges and facilitate conversation and consider equities of various kinds? He didn’t mention any of those that I recall, but we went by a number of these murals are not all just about the conflict, some of them are about peace. And so the most interesting was, I had no idea this was the case, so we’re driving along towards the end of the tour, we’re over on the other side, and here’s a mural, a huge mural, with Frederick Douglass right in the center of it, and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and whatever, and it turns out that Frederick Douglass left Boston and came to Belfast and started writing and doing stuff like that. He actually, I don’t know if he died here, I suppose he must have. So, I mean, that’s really ironic that he would end up in Belfast of all places. I thought that was a different era. I thought Douglass was Civil War era. He was. I thought the Prebles was mid-1900s. You know, when I wasn’t making a parallel era, I was just saying that’s, I just didn’t, never occurred to me that Frederick Douglass, the black dude, ended up in Ireland, you know? What’s with that, you know? I gotta research that a little bit. So I already picked another huge mural, I got a picture of it. And I’d be curious to know how the mural phenomenon got started, you know, how did they first conceive of documenting this on the, literally on the? You were filled with questions, to which we have no answers. Well, good on you, I’m glad you did that. Me too, that was very informative. Well, it was a little more authentic than I thought we were getting into. I thought it was just gonna be some history of wonk, you know, that went to university or whatever. I had no idea that we were signed up with a guy whose family was involved and literally lives on the wall and all that stuff. And maybe I should have, maybe I should have thought that the tour guides would be… Locals. Like the involved people would pressure, like you can’t come from somewhere else in the world and try to give a tour here. This, we’re here, we were in it, my father’s what died, my mom was shot, my, you know, whatever. Like, I guess it, I mean, it makes sense, but. I don’t know what you make of coincidence, but it’s interesting to me that Effie, who I just accidentally ran into outside the view and chatted up, she’s the one who recommended this guy. And he said that I don’t usually talk about personal things, you know, I usually just talk about what you’re talking about, like the history of the area and all that stuff. So he opened up to us about all that personal stuff, but he says he usually doesn’t do that. So, so it wasn’t because Effie got all that personal inside poop that she recommended him, just because he was very informed, I guess. But anyway, that was to our great advantage, and certainly made it. And it’d be interesting to take a tour with someone who was Protestant and was there at the time. And I assume what you would get is a very different take on the tour, where they would be focusing on, you know, the British Army is doing its best to resolve a situation that’s out of control and London needs to step in, London politicians are, you know, this is, we have to do something, how can we help? We were here to help, here we are helping, right? And look at these pictures of, I mean, he showed us photos of the British Army came in, and they had machine guns freaking everywhere, and the women came out and were giving them tea and biscuits because people wanted them there, at first. At first, everybody wanted them there. And then they did horrific shit, and that turned hundreds of thousands of people instantly against the British Army. And they started killing the British Army. But it’d be interesting to see a tour, it’d be interesting to see, like I think I have a better background now where I could try to watch a debate sort of format, right? Where two or more people are having a conversation about the history from a biased perspective, from their biased perspective. Like this is what happened, this is what happened. The problem with what he just said is that he downplayed the fact that all this happened. You know, yes, yes, you’re right, but the worst atrocity of that was this thing, right? Yes, this did happen, or no, that never happened. You know, that kind of conversation, you know, maybe I’ve had, but I mean, I’m sure historians spend decades trying to understand what the hell happened, and then everybody that experienced it, thousands of people, tens of thousands of people that are still alive today that experienced some aspect of it directly, their direct experience is gonna far outweigh anything a historian says about what happened on that day. Well, what happened on that day is that the fucking firebomb flew through my front window. Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting that you guys are doing that while I’m reading this field guide to nonviolence, because that’s one of the points that I read this morning. One of the great flaws in the effort toward nonviolence is that you grab a perspective and you ignore the other perspective. If you’re gonna move genuinely toward nonviolence, you must be inclusive of the perspectives and the experiences. Yeah, that’s hard work. Okay, so did we find a place to do search house and Celtic jewelry? Brad’s identified two places. Okay, that was a rather brief, abrupt ending. Sorry about that. So the episode is now over. What they were talking about is it was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, so they did a little ceremony on the Two-Farling-Penny Bridge. I can’t remember. I should look all these things up and be a better podcast host, but I’m not. So anyway, the reason they were talking about that was for this really cool ceremony they did where they were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. Okay, well, I hope you got something interesting out of that episode, and thank you for hanging out. And this wraps up episode 41 of J.F. Lawrence’s Ignorance. Join us next time for another riveting episode. Bye.