Glazed Eyes of War

By AM Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Guest writer Davy Carlin is jolted out of his warm reverie by the cold blast of austerity. Davy Carlin is a socialist activist in West Belfast.

With my family and neighbours, with childhood friends and such comrades in arms – we were all enjoying a street type party, enjoying the sun, enjoying a spell of quiet and calm from war, enjoying each other’s company and enjoying the spirit of solidarity whose energy was so embracing in those early years.

I could also see many of my good childhood mates, while around me I could see others in which we shared the daily experiences and at times the glazed eyes of war.

Yet I could feel my body at ease, my body within 2012 but within my mind of 1979, and as I enjoyed the hours of that day a thought though pulled me back to 2012.

I opened my eyes and realised that I had been just seconds away and not hours, and in doing so I had thought of the recent years, and of the deliberately created financial boom and then bust, which has further cemented wealth into the hands of the few, while further cementing poverty and heightening fear and despair for the many.

Indeed this proud community {as are similar working class Protestant communities} is again top of the list for socio-economic deprivation, with suicide and drug dependency being one of the highest in Europe. Unemployment is also rife, with many of our brightest and best once again leaving the area or seeking to emigrate abroad. With this, we also see more and more at each other’s throats for less and less peace funding scraps: essential services closing and many more being driven into eking out an existence within a life not yet lived.

Indeed nationalist working class areas ascend greatly in the top 50 of socio- economic deprivation. I felt the negativity and fear once again all around. 

As the man once said, and I had written from my earliest of years – you cannot eat a flag.

Of course some have done well and become wealthy from the peace bus, yet as I look around in 2012 at once proud communities, I see that internment is back, that gangs, many of which are paid up informers are being allowed to run riot and terrorise. Solidarity is becoming rarer, long won rights are being eroded, and our poorest are to work like slaves for little or nought.

So much such change, within but a few years.

I am for peace – and actively pursued it – yet grassroots agitation from the gut needs to ascend above self-interest and the wads upon some peace bus hips.

We need to go forward in gains, not backwards, I had thought.

Yet, peace is better than what we had in such a war wherein hundreds of thousands of our citizens were affected over those years, with lives lost, minds ripped and vicious circles created.

And such peace was always only the beginning, as it now shines a greater light onto the real battles to be fought.

I also thought briefly as to how when our ‘rulers’ and those who salivate over power begin to think that everything isn’t quite going their way and when ‘we rabble’ are starting to question – and when they believe that control is being ever so slightly tested or lost – then they revert to historical and repetitive type.

And so once again in 2012 we see that of the Orange and Green card, off the flag waving {which will soon hit the world news for months} - and drum beating being played. Indeed in recent times we had seen some leaders of Unionism playing that hereditary Orange card which see tensions and fears rise – and so seemingly doing so, once again, with little regard for outcome.

Ironically enough though, given my position on organised religion – it was the ‘fearlessness’ of some Protestant church leaders who had stood up on the Unionist side against such leadership's fear induced words and the condoning of hateful sectarian actions of the Black Institution against a Catholic church.

Indeed I had once again learnt of the ‘lawlessness’ in word and deed from those aspects of Unionism {who talk of themselves of great followers and upholders of the law} - this 35 years on, and on the very road in which I had first encountered such, from those of the same brand.