Three Years Later: Treading water in the nowhere zone

I came here to feel useful, now I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Sitting in my immaculately clean house, the walls are closing in. Its been like this for a few weeks and I’m not sure how much more I can stand.

Perhaps it’s a particularly post modern problem. In the old days our lives were defined by roles, patterns and expectations and if at times they felt suffocating, for the most part they gave shape and structure to our time on this earth. For most people these days that structure is found in consumerism, debt, financial obligations and, in some cultures, family expectations. I look at friends at home with their nicely defined lives…most are financially comfortable although burdened by mortgages, most are reasonably happy being reasonably challenged by their jobs, many are or have started a family. My life is shaped around none of this, but it leaves the uncomfortable question as to what my life is shaped around. Its pretty hard to shape anything around the void of not having any strong material needs or obligations or overriding personal ties. In one sense, I realise that I’ve made my bed and I certainly don’t want the beds my friends and contemporaries have made for themselves, so I can’t really complain

These days I’m often reminded of some words of wisdom from literature. I may be caught in what Douglas Coupland in Generation X called “option paralysis”, which is the tendency when faced with many options to choose none….proof of what I’ve suspected for a number of years now that having too much freedom is as bad as not having any. Perhaps most of us are simply not equipped to deal with a life in which we only have our own expectations to live up to, only ourselves to please. Life is about checks and balances, you may not like your job but you need to feed your kids/pay your mortgage/save up for that trip, you may not like your location but you there to be with a wonderful person. With too much freedom, you only have your self to blame if things are not right, and nothing is ever completely right. So you change location, change your job, change your circumstance but you’re never happy. After a while you begin to lose hope that anything will get better, no matter what you do. You begin to lose enthusiasm for what lies ahead, for life in general. You feel bad and you lose hope that you will feel better.

On this line of thought, I started to wonder about the euthanasia debate. My appetite for food had drained away with my appetite for life, my nights were filled with strange dreams which did not allow me to rest. There were plenty of things I could be getting on with at work, but I couldn’t muster the energy to get out of bed. Experts on euthanasia talk about dying with dignity and of a rational decision to die. I’ve always believed there was nothing wrong with that thinking and that people in pain should be allowed to die if that’s what they decide or if they are alive only in a technical sense. But recently I began to wonder, if this applies to physical pain, why doesn’t it also apply to mental pain? At what level and over what timescale can the wish not to live with mental pain become a rational decision to die?

I guess the euthanasia debate rests on the fact that, physically, the person cannot recover, where its always assumed that mental illness always has some degree of curability. I wonder though, at what level of drug prescription/assisted living will a mentally ill person fall into the category of only technically alive? What makes not wanting to live in pain for one person a rational decision to die and for another a permanent solution to a temporary problem? It opens some difficult questions…

I guess one difference is that unlike the case of mental illness, assisted suicide cases bring up the intriguing ethical dilemma that, in many cases, the person wishing to die is not physically able to kill themselves. However and whatever the depths of depression I have sometimes felt, there is always, at least in theory, the possibility of escaping…I cannot imagine the level of hopelessness that the person can have being in pain, wanting it over and knowing they don’t have the choice to end it. This case at least seems pretty clear cut, but is it only the thin end of wedge?

On who we were, who we are and who we might become

Perhaps there is too little entertainment here in Kigali and maybe I’m beginning to take my movies a little too seriously. I just sent out a few dvds from a friend in Europe, one contained last years Irish production “The Wind that Shakes the Barely”. The movie have been out in cinemas when I was last at home and a friend of a friend had recommended that I try to find time to see it, but I didn’t get the time then. The film is essentially about the background to the civil war in Ireland and paints a vivid picture of a fair recent and brutal past in Ireland.

It starts with the occupation by the “Black and Tans”, a military but quasi-mercenary force consisting mainly of troops too screwed up by experiences on the front line in WW1 to be used anywhere else. So called because of their uniforms, they were sent to quell the independence movement which were gaining momentum after the 1916 rising. Stories of the black and tans and the civil war were familiar to me, my grandmother and people of my parents generation often spoke of it and the civil war provided the historical beginnings of the unofficial two party system I grew up with in Ireland. We are multi party democracy of course, things are slowly changing these days but till practically the 21^st century it was either the Fianna Fail or Fine Gael party vying for the majority.

“The black and tans were wild dogs…” “Civil war is an awful thing” “Who does your family vote for?”

We grew up knowing that there was a time, before Independence, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were not so much armed terrorists and extremists but rather a resistance movement against British occupation, that enjoyed popular support with the vast majority of Irish people. This movie is set in such a time and I know my grandmother had hidden guns in her piano for the IRA and that two of her brothers were active members. We grew up with stories about Black and Tan atrocities. I was often told of the time they stopped my great uncle, asked his name and details and simply told him to run home. So he started running, but only a few yards later a local police man told him to walk as slow as he could home. Apparently, this was a favourite pastime, telling people to run and then shooting them for “running away from questioning”. I was told that same uncle, died in hospital aged 80, delirious from whatever will killing him and rambling about that episode. We later heard that the IRA and their tactics to oust the British are regarded as the first known incidence of modern guerrilla warfare. And just like the lead characters in the film, my grandmothers brother’s grew up together, fought the British side by side, took opposite sides in the civil war, both eventually emigrated to the US and never spoke to each other again. Terrible thing, civil war.

The civil war came about after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, by a treaty with the British which saw the withdrawal of all British forces. This same treaty gave the 26 counties a parliament under the British king, while keeping the 6 northern counties as part of Britain, sowing the seeds for the ongoing situation in Northern Ireland. Those who supported the treaty were tired of violence and felt it was the best deal available at the time, and that rejecting it would mean the return of the Black and Tans reign of terror. Those who opposed pointed to the 700 year long history of British treaties with rebels in Ireland, none of which lead to Independence. They felt it was selling the Northerners down the line and abhorred the clause requiring members of the new Irish parliament to swear allegiance to the crown. It was the quintessential clash of political idealism and realpolitik and it divided the nation, and divided families even into the future when the treaty was an irreversible fact. With hindsight, the classic British policy for Ireland and elsewhere, of divide and conquer had worked again. The Free State was far too much involved in combating anti-treaty forces (the republicans) to work at easing the concessions in the treaty. And of course, they depended on Britain for the arms to continue fighting. Much the same story has been playing out all over Africa since the 50s.

With the subsequent problems of northern Ireland and the cost to the British of fighting the Republican forces, its easy to think that the treaty was a sell out. But they didn’t know that WW2 was just around the corner and the end of the British Empire was in sight. The empire must have looked pretty formidable in 1920 and Britain’s need to keep Independence movements in check was critical – much the same story has been playing out between Taiwan and China since the 70s. After independence in 1948, we had strong personality leaders, civil war politics, a mini boom in the 60s followed by all sorts of corruption and chicanery in 70s and 80s, the extent of which was not known till much later. After years of fighting for the right to self determination and the right to our own language and culture, slowly we began to lose many elements we had retained in the face of colonisation. One of the things I have never liked about Ireland was how we gave up on our language. Much damage had been done by independence, that’s true, and the State keep it in the education system but it is we who, post independence, abandoned our culturally unique way of expressing ourselves en masse.

So our recent history is written in violence, brutality, fierce idealism in which people will die for their cause juxtaposed against political realism and pandering profiteers out for all they can get. But above all, ours a history of struggle - political struggle for independence until 1948, diplomatic struggles for unification and later compromise on the northern question and all this against a fierce economic struggle right up until the end of the 20^th century. If you are defined by struggle, what happens when its gone?

There is a stubbornness in our character which probably defines too much of what we are – almost like we forget who we are if someone is not telling us what we can and can’t do or if we have no one to blame for our troubles. Or perhaps, a better way to see it is to wonder what a blade might be without the stone to rub against. For a while there, after the boom it seemed as if we were really lost. When I was at university, few ever expected to have a good job and suddenly there was a whole batch of people who could afford a car, a house a few hundred beers…at 25! There was a lot of drink and drugs and fast living, and the rampant orgy of consumerism continues today, although many of my generation are spending their money in Ikea and their local wine merchant rather than the disco and the boozer. I was told that a third of the Irish economy comes from the property market…the gombeen men continue to make money for nothing, and run for parliament, as the Celtic Tiger profits go into the pockets of the developers while the country still doesn’t have a decent public transport system (not since we dismantled the stuff the British built in any case).

A cabinet member in the 90s noted that politically “we are closer to Boston than Berlin”. This may be true and we have certainly benefited from competitive business policies, but its no time to throw the baby (European style social programs and infrastructure development) out with the bath water (European style corporate incentives and labour markets). I doubt there is anyone in the country who wishes US style social problems and cut throat capitalism as a future for Ireland. It doesn’t much help that the educated, reasonably well off socially minded types in Ireland who might have the time and energy to give a damn are too busy running to keep up with their mortgage and childcare costs to get involved in politics.

I heard recently that the Irish language is making a bit of comeback…people are finally interested in being able to speak the cupla focal. This renewed interest appears to have stemmed from the increasing numbers of foreign migrants and immigrants, following the economic boom and our lack of barriers to freedom of labour from newer EU member states. Could it be that we may start to remember what defines us and acquire again a common vision of future, now that we have the new blade of immigration to deal with?