and i want them galvanized.

If there's one thing you should know about me, it's that I hate to make a scene.  If I'm brought the wrong order at a restaurant, I will quietly eat what was placed in front of me.  I take the time to street-view a new route on Google Maps before I leave the house so I don't look a spectacle getting lost.  And when I'm in a foreign country I long to be invisible, going out of my way to mumble so that no one can hear my accent, or I try my hardest to make everything go smoothly so as to promote the illusion that, even if I'm foreign, I know what I'm doing.  If there's anything I dislike more than eating eggs, it's feeling clueless and unprepared, and that's exactly the feeling that Belfast served up on Sunday.

Our Black Taxi tour began with the driver warning me that I needed to cover my Shanahan sweatshirt logo.  His Northern Ireland accent was a trifle difficult to understand, so at first all I heard was him asking me if I was an Irish dancer.  I smiled a bit and nodded, but he kept talking about my "jumper" and asking if I had anything else to wear.  Slowly, the reality of the situation began to dawn on me, full enlightenment descending when another driver came over and said (jokingly) that it'd be okay because he had a gun in his taxi.  If anyone bothered me... Well, feeling a tad uncomfortable and incredibly embarrassed, I announced that I had a big scarf that would cover the logo, and as I was wrapping it around my neck, I turned my Newman backpack towards the seat and wish I'd stayed home.

This is the sweater I was wearing, but flash back to me on the Antrim coast the day before I realized how dumb it was to wear this.

We were going to the Shankill, you see, and it's a place that was a little hard to believe at first.  Toni Morrison once wrote that all art is political, and I never really stopped to think about that until now.  There are gigantic political murals on almost all the houses in the Shankill, celebrating Protestantism (or in the case of most of them: anti-Catholicism) in the North.  The first one I saw featured your typical Protestant hero, King Billy on a rearing white horse, framed by the date 1690.  Look to your left and there's a memorial to Oliver Cromwell and his hatred of Catholics.  These are pretty standard fare, I'd say, and things I've encountered numerous times studying history.  So, in other words, as angry as Oliver Cromwell makes me, it's a lot like how I feel about Andrew Jackson.  I can distance myself and appreciate what they brought to the table, what they contributed to their times.  These two murals were nothing less than what I expected to see in Ulster.

When you turn around, though, you're confronted with a progression of hatred.  On one mural, a serial killer is celebrated on the side of his family's house for his success in murdering fifty-five Catholics.  Strangely enough, this is followed by a mural that features pastel-drawn children playing on a sunny day, which is followed by the most terrifying salute to the Ulster volunteers.  Our cab driver called it the Ulster Mona Lisa, and, no joke, this is where it gets really freaky, because no matter where you go, the rifle of the gunman follows you.  Up and down, side to side, forward and backward.  I had felt odd before, slightly uneasy, but once this mural was explained to me, I just felt one thing: targeted.

 Looks cheery, right?  In the background is the guy who killed 55 Catholics and who is now a hero for it.

I wish no one had told me about him.  I had nightmares that night.  He really does follow you everywhere.

Now, when someone mentions feeling "uncomfortable" in an OSCA discussion, you can usually count on a chorus of groans accompanied by eyerolls and mumbled annoyance.  This is where I usually get pissed off, get on stack, and yell at people for being disrespectful.  So, for those of you who are probably reading this and rolling your eyes, I would like to inform you that what I felt was real, regardless of how much or how little real danger there may have been (because, let's be honest, the painting was not going to shoot me down).  I am a privileged, white girl from suburbia Ohio, and, as such, I can say that I have never felt so... well... uncomfortable.  History has made me cry before, and I've been angry about injustices to the point of wanting to scream, but I have never experienced this before.  It's hard to describe, but I'm glad I had this experience.  Nothing bad happened, but I feel like I'm a little older after it's all been said and done.  It was really eye-opening, is what I'm trying to say,  and in a lot of different ways.  It brought me closer to my identity as a Catholic; it helped me realize how comfortable I actually do feel in Galway; and it helped me realize just how naive and ignorant I still am...

Moving on before I close out, how many of you have heard of the Berlin Wall?  Alright, well, how many of you knew that there are still walls dividing the Catholics and the Protestants in Belfast manned by British soldiers, covered in graffiti and the occasional burn mark, governed by curfews?  They say it's a little different than the Berlin Wall, and I'm willing to accept that, because it's not keeping people in against their wills, but rather a supposedly voluntary segregation to keep the peace.  It's too high for Molotov cocktails to make it over (hence, the burn marks).  But, on the other hand, the fact is that it's 2011 and I can't wear a sweatshirt without feeling uneasy, and we still need walls to keep the peace because we're so damned stuck in how we are that we can't see how ridiculous it all is.  Like I said, it's really eye-opening.

So, if art is political, what about the art on the other side of the wall around Falls Street?  It's still politicized, but, for some reason, it's less shocking, and, I'll admit that it's in part because I'm Catholic, but I don't think it's crazy to think a lot of you would agree.  Now, I'm not saying either side is right or wrong--they both killed people for reasons that depress me--but what the Catholic side chose to commemorate was easier to swallow.  There were beautiful murals supporting the underdogs in world conflicts--the Gaelic language, Cuba, Palestine, the Basque region--and memorials to the fallen, whether it was the innocent who died on Bombay Street in the 60s, or Bobby Sand's hunger strike.  Both sides committed atrocities, but the difference is in what they chose to celebrate... if that makes any sense?

So, now that I've been properly galvanized, I suppose it's time for me to get to bed.  I had a long weekend and I have a long week ahead.  Expect a more light-hearted entry on gallivanting across the Antrim coast and exploring Belfast City Center sometime soon.

G'night.