WE are living through dangerous times.
I am conscious that I write that sentence in the sitting room of my house. A house which is sheltering me and my family from the elements (yes, even the Biblical cloudbursts that there have been this week).
In the normal run of my week I need not fear dying of exposure.
Hot water comes from my taps in abundance. I am comfortable. My family are comfortable. Most of you reading this column are comfortable.
And yet.
And yet I feel deeply uneasy.
I don’t recognise the world around me. All the battles that the liberal, the progressive among us, assumed were won seem to be being fought again. And being fought as if for the first time. As if the struggle, the sacrifice that went before never happened.
George Santayana claimed in the infancy of the last century that: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
But how much more appalling is it to be aware of the worst horrors of the past and watch them emerge again?
Neo-Nazis marched through the streets at the weekend. They weren’t marching outside my house, but they weren’t marching outside my grandparents’ house in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the world reeled from the assault.
White supremacists - the KKK, for God’s sake – with burning torches are on the streets in America. They are thousands of miles from my door, but they have been emboldened by dark forces which have been unleashed across the world and cast a shadow over all of us.
The PSNI was among the police forces that reported a rise in hate crimes in the days immediately after three terror attacks in Britain earlier this year.
We may be a small part of a small island, but we are also part of the world around us.
A civil rights protester is dead and 19 have been injured after a neo-Nazi ploughed his car into a crowd of dispersing demonstrators.
Heather Heyer. Say her name.
A paralegal who provided help to people at risk of repossessions and evictions she “would literally sit in the office and cry at times because she was worried about what was going to happen to the country”.
North Carolina KKK leader Justin Moore said he was “glad” she was run down and killed in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It has ominous echoes of the Freedom Summer murders, which were seared onto the popular imagination by the film `Mississippi Burning’.
Hate is marching and hate thinks it can win this time.
What can I do to stop it - sitting in my living room in my house on a small part of a small island; feeling sick to my stomach as I check my Twitter feed and watch the news?
What can any of us do?
We can say Heather Heyer’s name. We can heed the words of her last Facebook post before her death: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
We can stop thinking that because we can, for the most part sleep safely in our beds and fill our fridges in the small part of our small island, that things happening half a world away have nothing to do with us.
Just because we can’t march with those facing down evil doesn’t mean that we can’t stand with them.
I was not the only person disgusted at the reaction of some Cork fans when taken to task for the use of the Confederate flag at its GAA matches.
It is the same flag that was widely being flown at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia the day before its appearance at Croke Park.
The county board has condemned use of the flag, and yet still it flies.
Defending it, a poster on the People’s Republic of Cork website claimed to “abhor racism of any kind (but) still be reasonably comfortable flying a Confederate flag at a Cork GAA match… but because at Cork matches I like to show the Red and White and it's (sic) association with Rebels, and the South”.
Red and white, eh? What’s wrong with the Red Cross flag?
The `south’? Does he mean association with the American south? Well that’s not a homogenous group of tobacco-chewing, Harley riders. In 2015 that same flag was removed from the South Carolina capital.
When I was a child I used to blithely sing `Sambo’, until a teacher gently explained its racist overtones to me. I was horrified and stopped immediately.
I was 11 years old.
Ignorance is no defence, and when someone schools you, you certainly can’t plead ignorance any more.
These are dangerous times. Everything we say and do matters.
