S2 Book Club: Making Sense of The Troubles

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground uh today we're going to continue our book club series and we're going to take a look at making sense of the troubles a history of the Northern Ireland conflict so I realized right up front this is a little bit more ambitious to probably get through in a month uh but we'll give it a shot anyway so just a sort of a brief introduction this book here if you're looking to get an actual uh copy of of this book uh I would strongly recommend because it's a very good reference book for uh the conflict in Northern Ireland uh however it's not the easiest read and uh it doesn't really contain a lot of the details that we might be hoping for from an American perspective this really just talks about the Strategic level highlevel geopolitical stuff that was going on in Northern Ireland and what sort of led up to the conflict in trying to be as neutral of a source as possible you you lose a lot of the the um atmosphere of what was kind of going on at the time so so it tends to be a little bit washed out sometimes just because uh they're trying to kind of water down some of these issues to to not appear uh to take one side or the other so this is good if you're trying to have like a more research uh oriented project and you're looking for a source for that uh but it really doesn't help us get to kind of the meat of the matter with some of these more controversial topics and as we all know the conflict in Northern Ireland was most certainly full of controversy so for those of you who have not uh done the reading this time around don't worry uh I will explain the general rundown of the conflict in Northern Ireland so uh the troubles as we know them uh the troubles in Northern Ireland really uh talk about a 30-year period from the late 1960s to the late 1990s uh in Northern Ireland that really was the result of conflict between two major factions within uh Northern Ireland So speaking super broadly we have uh the Protestant unionists which were those who lived in Northern Ireland mostly of a Protestant faith that desired for Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom so they wanted a more unionist uh kind of approach to things conversely to that we had the Republicans the Catholics who were mostly all about wanting Northern Ireland to become part of the ROI the Republic of Ireland uh or you know sometimes you could say it's more of an independence uh kind of movement it didn't really start out that way it started out very small as most domestic issues do but there's your two general main factions you've got the Protestant loyalists the Protestant unionists who wanted Northern Ireland to stay with the United Kingdom and you had the Catholic nationalists who wanted uh Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland or its own Nation outright uh depending on what year you're talking about separate from these two main factions we also have the factions that we may know from the outside being from an American audience we of course have the British army who kind of tried to play sort of the man in the- Middle sort of uh in some circumstances that can be kind of inflammatory because more often than not the British army actually did end up taking the Protestant side of course because they uh wanted a more unionist kind of approach right but that's a very very hot topic right uh along with them you have the ru the Royal olster constabulary which is basically the police force in Northern Ireland which was most mostly Protestant mostly of a unionist nature so we have all the people with guns kind of on the side of the unionists now just to balance that out right we can't have one without the other so on the side of the Irish nationalists uh we have groups that sort of ended up forming over time mostly the the biggest one that we may know as Americans is the IRA the provincial Ira uh the paramilitary organization which served as the military uh aders to the British Army and the Royal ster constabulary again bouncing back over to the other side we also have a largely unknown faction to an American audience which was the uh olster volunteer Force which was basically again sort of like the IRA for the unionists uh so we had a paramilitary organization on that side so uh these are the main factions that we have that we're kind of dealing with with this conflict so as we can see this is kind of getting complicated right to start with we have everything from local civil groups to paramilitary groups on both sides we have federal police agencies and we have uh foreign military assets which of course complicate things on both sides so what started the conflict that we know as the troubles well really we have to go back to the year 1609 when the king of England at the time wanted to basically put down a rebellion and ended up transplanting a lot of uh Protestant leadership uh into Northern Ireland really into just four counties right this is all we're talking about is just uh sort of four counties for the most part uh where this conflict began so these four counties over time ended up being a huge huge problem because as we all know and this is kind of a a theme going forward for today and some of the kind of the Lessons Learned for here in the United States is that the tiniest little diplomatic thing hundreds of years ago Echo today right so what did that end up causing well there are a lot of issues back and forth for a few hundred years but the next Milestone that we get to Is 1920 when uh the Republic of Ireland which was what is now known as the Republic of Ireland had uh their war of independence so following that Civil War we had uh partition uh in the 1920s in which the Republic of Ireland as it's known today then it was called the Irish Free State uh that became its own nation and Northern Ireland just kind of sat there and stayed part of the United Kingdom setting conditions for later the next biggest uh point that we have is really from the 1920s up until like the 19 early 1960s we had uh a period of I'm just going to simplify and say uh Jerry mandering and under representation uh on the part of the Catholic populations in these four counties in Northern Ireland so it turns out that most of the people living in these areas were uh Catholic but they were being ruled by or ministered by or um you know politically like controlled by Protestants so you could have an area where it's 90% of the people living uh in the area are Catholic but they somehow happen to have a Protestant representative so that caused a lot of problems uh because the tensions between Catholics and Protestants even to this day in some of these neighborhoods are uh are pretty high so this is very very confusing from an American perspective because we can not possibly imagine uh walls physical like Berlin walls going up between a Protestant Street and a Catholic Street we can't possibly fathom that and I'll get to that in a moment but this is how the conflict kind of shook out and uh you know right towards the late 1960s we had the Battle of bogside which really kind of cemented the era of armed conflict uh within Northern Ireland and it just kind of spiral downhill from there so as violence became the main solution for a lot of people uh mostly Republicans living in these areas uh we also have to remember that violence was also carried out on the behalf of the unionists right so we have the Royal olster constabulary and we have the olster volunteer force and we also have the olster defense Association which again these are just different factions with varying levels of power within their areas that also carried out violence on behalf of um the unionist side of things so this uh really manifested itself in the way that we as America like to know uh as the IRA resulting in well them and other paramilitary organizations resulting in violence to get their uh means across so we have about 20 years of extremely violent uh actions bombings uh kidnappings murders you name it it happened in Northern Ireland uh eventually uh really the um even to this day I think many of the Irish living in Northern Ireland treat the peace as very tenuous uh the Irish today are very suspicious of this peace agreement uh but basically towards the end of the 90s uh both sides had had enough of the violence and the British Army and their heavy-handed response wasn't uh really helping out anybody on either side to be honest so the UK uh and and the British forces uh proper uh got tired of being the man in the middle and uh we reach what we know as the Good Friday agreement so after many many years of extreme violence uh and both sides getting really bogged down in their own ideology and really getting to a point to where uh both the uler forces and the IRA uh really not realizing why they're fighting anymore um we kind of arrive at the sort of what's generally recognized is the end of the conflict with the Good Friday a peace agreement uh this is a peace deal that basically cemented the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland it didn't really solve many diplomatic things uh but it did bring a peace to the region albeit very suspiciously so the takea away from the Good Friday agreement is that it allowed Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom though with basically a special diplomatic status and it allowed for Northern Ireland to become part of the ROI if the uh Republic of Ireland wanted them to do so so it allowed the potential for a referendum both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland and we see this kind of shaking out even in modern-day politics occasionally you'll get a uh sort of I want to say right-wing but a republican conservative uh politician in Northern Ireland will come out and say you know we're going to uh uh we're going to have a referendum and basically get shut down immediately because nobody wants to mess with the Good Friday agreement so this is kind of where things stand right now uh in Northern Ireland very tenuous very suspicious very hesitant piece but a piece nonetheless and I'm sure that it's very much appreciated at least for now so that's the troubles uh that's kind of the overview that we need to know now as you might imagine uh trying to go through this conflict and kind of cherryi some of the information and some of the the attributes of this conflict that uh can apply to what we're going through in America today is not exactly the easiest thing to do also it's very easy and what I mean by that is well you know if you boil things down to very very simple terms it's kind of easy to see how this applies to the United States today you know let me just throw out something you know you've got uh hundreds of years uh of marginalization Jerry mandering and under representation of one group right a minority controlling uh the politics of a local area controlling all the seats controlling all the political representation and you've got that kind of conflict breaking out but amongst the people who are underrepresented you also have a division as well you have the people who want to pursue a peaceful alternative uh with the people who are kind of tyrannizing them to use that word I know kind of inflammatory but uh we also have the people that think that violence is is the answer when it comes to uh the under representation that they are facing that sounds really familiar as to what's going on here in the United States so we can kind of draw these parallels very very Loosely now where the parallels kind of stop and things get a little bit hairy to describe is the uh Protestant Catholic Dynamic so you know here in the United States it's very very difficult to describe uh because the the attitudes in both protestantism and Catholic Catholicism are very very different here in the United States we could never imagine in America uh conflict like armed conflict especially breaking out between Catholics and Protestants it's just an it's just not understandable to us whereas in Ireland it makes perfect sense because well it's these these communities are more it's more heavily ingrained in their society the cultural differences than it is amongst Christians in the United States now you can say that there are other factions in the United States that make this more more complicated and that's that's definitely true uh but when it comes to the Protestant Catholic dynamic in the United States it's it's very hard to kind of draw these parallels I mean you know I hate to lean on studies to kind of get my point across because anybody can manipulate a a research study uh but it just time and time again and this is you know my own personal experience as well is that a lot of Protestants in the United States people who are practicing a denomination of Christianity that derived from protestantism a lot of times they don't know that they're technically Protestant um whereas Catholics you know they they understand that they're Catholic but a lot of people like say you know a Free Will Baptist or something like that down here in the Bible Belt they may not know that their denomination of Christianity was a split from protestantism itself and it it's still considered to be part of protestantism so you know you ask people a lot of times like you know where did the the where did the uh origins of your denomination come from and they just can't tell you um it routinely is routinely indicated that people who in the United States that uh practice a denomination of protestantism they have no idea who M Martin Luther is a lot of times depending on which study you go with it can be as many as half you know of Protestants don't know who Martin Luther is and how that resulted in their particular uh denomination that they choose to practice so uh that would be completely unheard of in in Northern Ireland I think but here in the United States we just don't really have a clear view of of where many of our denominations came from even people who are in those uh particular denominations so again very very uh interesting people uh maybe are learning a lot more about that these days you know as time goes on and as things get more tough here in the United States uh people people get more um they try to get closer to God in a lot of cases and uh we're starting to see this research come out and people are realizing that maybe the the faith that they grew up with is not uh what they believe now so uh we're seeing this I'm seeing this particularly on social media a lot of people trying to get back uh to a level of understanding for themselves but you know coming back to Northern Ireland uh that understanding was there and uh the divisions between Protestant communities and Catholic communities are not just along religious lines either they're also along political lines and you can't even really say that it's left versus right uh a lot of times it's just very very different so for instance let me talk about the the IRA split the uh o IRA and the P Ira the provincial Ira so on the Republican side on the Catholic dominated side uh which was again more in favor of I guess you want to say independence more or less uh there's a lot of infighting going on uh between there and we have actually the roots of that you know coming forward to to today so we have originally the IRA uh engaging in politics some might say that the IRA really just had um no real motivation to to engage in politics and they always wanted violence to be the answer um I would disagree to some to some extent but uh for whatever reason we have the O Ira which became kind of the political wing of things and we had the provincial Ira which is the paramilitary organization so two different groups very different groups the provincial Ira officially sort of sort of died out whereas the oira eventually became known as Shen Fain which is the modernday more or less Marxist Communist Party of Northern Ireland and you know they hold quite a bit of power I say so we can see that it's not necessarily along Catholic Protestant lines but we also have things along left versus right you know we have a center left party uh fighting a far-left party or a not even farle i' say just like a moderate to farle so you see how these things kind of work out it's not as simple as saying Good Guy versus bad guy or bad guy versus good guy it has nothing to do with that you can't look at any of the factions in this in this conflict and say these were the Undisputed winners or Good Guys in this conflict everybody had some benefit some downfall so so these are some of the things that I'm kind of thinking about when it comes to the United States you know um just kind of steamrolling through with you know my my random thoughts again um I think one of the things that this highlights for me and I just keep coming back to this concept is that history matters a lot and not this history that you're spoonfed in school but like the real history of what went on on and it may not even be considered history it may just be considered like a recent kind of thing that happened um but it it really does seem to matter you know um things that happened you know centuries ago the tiniest little thing uh most certainly can become a much larger issue down the line and when I read this I think what seeds are we sewing now uh that are going to be reaped in the future are these good seeds or bad and oh boy that's a tough question isn't it so you know we see how something as simple as a a simple Jerry mandering uh event or you know I don't even know if you'd want to call it systemic oppression I guess you probably could I'm sure the Catholics would call it uh systemic oppression the Protestants may may may not so uh depending on you know which side you're on I guess but from kind of like an American like semi- neutral perspective right um it sure does seem like a political issue that could have been solved with politics hundreds of years ago because it was not solved politically because it was not solved with peace that sort of mandated violence at a later time uh at least in Northern Ireland and that's really a shame you know uh because I think that basically all of all of these problems I think could have been solved I don't think I don't think that War or conflict in Northern Ireland was was inevitable uh up until a certain point right around the time we get to the Battle of boide 1968 I think that was pretty much the beginning of the end right uh that was basically where all the possible Futures all the possible paths that Northern Ireland could have taken this one was was really kind of narrows it down to one and that was War uh however before that you know in the decades leading up to that we we sort of had points to where this could have gone a different way uh this could have been solved diplomatically or politically so something to remember you know and just you know I hate to digress immediately but that's what I always do I guess thinking about things here in the United States is kind of the same way it's like have we reached the point of no return I I don't know you know have we some people would say yes I most days think yes I think that by now the United States is on a track and we've only got two or three paths in front of us you know a few years ago we had a few dozen paths you know a few you know dozen uh centuries ago we had infinite paths in front of us but as time has gone on we have narrowed down our potential Futures and our potential courses uh National courses down to just one or two and I think that right now um a hard times are coming and I think that uh we're definitely um going to be reading history books uh Generations from now that talk about yeah uh 2020 was yet 2020 was our uh sort of you know Battle of the bogside kind of thing where this was our historians are going to say that was probably um the point of no return just like how people can probably say you know 2016 e even or maybe even 2020 was the start of World War III you know um we have these you know the the the curse of uh not having hindsight right now because we're living through these times but I think that in the future people are going to look uh at at the the times we're living in and say yeah this is when it all kind of started or rather this is not when it started this is when the beginning of the end uh sort of began so I know not exactly cheery but the good news is that uh even with a conflict as horrible as the troubles in Northern Ireland you know an armed conflict largely among a civilian populace in Western Europe man that's that's rough but the good news is that even as as horrible that conflict was and even at the absolute height of that war uh if you asked anyone if you asked anyone in that conflict do you think peace will ever come to Northern Ireland they would probably say no at the height of that war but what do we know we know that peace did come so that's a a pretty uh positive outlook on on things I think so uh again one of the the other things that kind of jumped out at me is the oira the and the P split uh like I've said before in today's society in the United States you are always always always going to run up against internal conflict you're always going to have people who think that violence is the answer sooner than you do or you may think violence is the answer a lot sooner than someone else so you might find that you know it's really challenging to get anyone even to talk to you you know if you are uh in extreme one way or the other you know if you're in a group of people in your community and you are the only person advocating for peace you're probably not going to be listened to likewise if you're the opposite if you're in your little community and you are the only person advocating for violence you you may uh not have a good time right so this really just does stress that um civil conflict and civil um sort of societies really approach violence very differently and you're not going to have an easy time in getting people to understand that that level right you're going to have big events like you know famous battles right you're going to have famous atrocities that are like well you know now we have to go to war um but before these events these Milestones it's going to be very hard to convince people um that you know we have choices here so again something to keep in mind with with just kind of American Civil Society you know um you know I interact with people a lot and some people think you know you know they they fed post all day long man and they're not getting anywhere because no one's at their level yet now whether they're right or whether they're wrong is is Up For Debate right it doesn't really matter whether they're right or they're wrong if no one's there agreeing with him and sitting you know sitting there saying you know we need to do this now um it's going to be hard to get things done because right now we're having a hard time convincing you know anybody to just go with the peaceful options nowadays I mean good grief you know it's it's really challenging to talk about uh because when you do talk about these kinds of things you tend to um tick off people on both sides of the issue so you've got the people who want you know things like voting and civil activism and um non-compliance and things like that you've got those people who think that's the the majority of their their efforts right um you also have people who think that violence is the first option uh and having an opinion in society where you think that neither of these extremes if you want to call it that you know the extreme pacifist kind of situation and the extreme violence having an opinion where neither one of those is a good option is very dangerous in society because no one will agree with you everyone's kind of comfortably in their camps and we see this kind of with the the split uh within the IRA lots of infighting you know amongst people who think you know car bombs are not the solution and then you also have people that say well you know we're not getting anywhere voting you know that sounds really familiar to both you know Northern Ireland and the United States uh you know amongst people out there in the real world today it's uh it's pretty challenging to have a to try to have a more measured approach to things by saying look you know there's a time and a place for everything uh but you know having a little bit of give and take here and there is uh solely so that the adversarial forces don't steamroll you you know it seems like it was very challenging for Northern Ireland and it's also very challenging for the United States of America you know we all know that the conservative movement right in America well you know let me examine the really short list of things the conservatives have conserved in America um politically at least amongst the elected politicians um that sort of you know attitude is out there and you know we look at the these these people and you know uh it's really hard to get people to even talk to each other for one but you know there's so much Division and factionalization within the American conservative kind of attitude that you know they we we look at the leftists and see kind of the same thing you know the leftists are are so man their their confusion is kind of entertaining because of this whole Israel Gaza situation because you know we've got different factions that are uh sort of pulling that Community apart as well and it's happening to conservatives as well so anyway you know you see how how kind of complicated this is and and how I'm really struggling to kind of put into words um how as confli as complicated as the Northern Ireland conflict was in the United States is a lot more complicated already and we're not even at the stage where you know violence is is breaking out we have unrest uh and we certainly have that but uh we don't have Ira levels of things going on we don't have uvf levels of things going on uh just yet thankfully um but uh the the extra factions that we have here in the United States we don't just have like you know our version of the British army our version of uh the uvf or Ru we don't have our we have those you know we have the our modern equivalence of those here in the United States but we also have third parties you know we have tens of thou tens of millions of of people who are not citizens here uh which are adding complexity to the equation we also have people who are you know they're born here but culturally they could not be any different you know than the average American out there and it's it's so hard to see you know um just thinking about the Northern Ireland conflict if you were to take the average Catholic in Northern Ireland and the average Protestant you put them in a room together you know you couldn't tell them apart you know looking at them just looking at them you could not tell them apart most of the time they looked physically very very similar you know because they're just they're they're Irishmen right here in the United States man we've got Zombie Land in most American cities like you look at some people and think what are you like and I don't mean to be derogatory when I say that but I mean good grief man I don't know what some of these people are and I am really having a lot of I really having a lot of questions these days as to what is going on in our society so you know Northern Ireland didn't really have to deal with that they just had centuries old um disputes we have centuries old disputes here too but we've got people who don't look like they belong to any Nation you know it's like like what are you where are you from like where's your people at you know I don't I don't understand like you know a lot of uh the cultural divisions here in the United States but I can tell you man it it looks like you're walking around a an alien land sometimes here in the United States but anyway I guess this kind of All Leads up to really something I'm having a hard time describing so maybe some of you out there know a word or a term for what I'm trying to describe here uh I have it here in my notes listed as societal loading and I know that's not the right term but I I think in terms of like a geologist you know looking at a volcano and you don't even have to be a geologist to look at a volcano and say that sucker about to blow right uh because there are indicators right we can look at the volcano and say all right there's smoke coming out the top there are many earthquakes reported over the past few weeks um there's changes in the geology right like that Peak is now 14 feet higher than it was yesterday you know we can look at these things we can measure it that's how you know in places like Iceland um volcanic eruptions which happen all the time they have the data and they can predict these things with fairly pinpoint accuracy well if I'm looking at Society I see kind of that same amount of pressure building like the the magma just below the surface that's just becoming pressurized and you know you see that in Northern Ireland and you know it kind of broke out in the late 1960s early '70s that pressure just just released and um here in the United States I feel I feel like we may not have had as many years of this societal loading going on but uh it goes back well over a century for sure you know we are definitely dealing with issues today where that seed of that issue was planted at least a hundred years ago right even just coming out of World War II I would argue that probably most of the problems in the world today stem from the outcome of World War II and how the powers uh powers that be kind of shook out and how uh the world kind of settled into what at the time was kind of a new situation right uh I think that really coming out of World War II and the Cold War uh you know the arms races and all that kind of stuff that was going on you know we look at the United States and the Soviet Union as being kind of the driving actors behind that but good grief man there were other players too for sure and I think that a lot of times we just lose a scale of of the magnitude for this if you read through this book as an American right and you read through uh all this stuff you you get the idea that um you know Irish Society at the time or european Society at large was like a coral reef right it's just teeming with life you know uh or it's like a river you know in you know the South American jungles where you just take a water sample from the river and you find out there's like 12,000 things living in that vial it's the same kind of idea right in in European Society particularly in Northern Ireland you every page in this book you get introduced to someone new or some new faction or some new new area it is so incredibly complicated this just there's just so much life and so much interaction and Society is just it's like it may not be a thriving civilization but man is it active for sure you know and there's a lot of conflict back and forth but man is is it active and then I and I swivel over here to the United States and I look and I and I see just a gray sickly dead coral reef where people are so afraid to talk to one another now you know especially after Co but let's face it it was going that way before Co ever since Facebook hit man Society has been has been going downhill and I I just feel like you know the fact that I've had so many people ask me and so many people have been trying to figure out how do you build community you know and the fact that I don't have an answer for that yet that's very telling because no one would ask that in Northern Ireland during this conflict it's like you do what you got to do you get your get the boys together right um no matter what side you're on and here in the United States it's like We're a nation of individuals at this point you know there's very little interaction what do we call Civil Service well you know what do we call you know engaging in the political system voting right well you know they they did that in Northern Ireland too you know what else they had they had clubs they had societies they had organizations they had cultural groups they had teams they had uh volunteer forces they had all of this stuff they had all of these ways that people were living their lives and interacting with others and nowadays in the United States man we it's it's like you know really hard to to to say that we have the same level of Civic engagement or you know anything like that so it's really really hard you know I say all that to say look it's really really hard to say that the troubl is is going to happen here in the United States I disagree I don't think people care enough for it to happen that's why we haven't had it happen people just don't uh they don't care enough about well their own existence um and this is irrespective of Left Right Center you know blue or red or whatnot it just seems like not enough people care and um a lot of people say uh a lot of people try to shoehorn this into whatever argument they want to make but you know when you see like kind of a thriving Society um you know or very very active uh groups of people it's very very challenging to to see the same level of Engagement here you know how many famous ministers and and religious pastors and priests do do the does the average American know probably they probably know their own priest and they may know you know a bishop or two and they may know like the pope and they may know on the Protestant side of things they may know um you know their local pastor of course and they may know a uh a deacon uh or a few deacons you know in the church but you know most of the time you know even people within Protestant churches they're like wait there's a church hierarchy here besides my own church like oh there's a there's a regional bishop or something you know it's hard for people to grasp whereas in Ireland it's just it's so worthy of not mention it's not even in the book but I read it from an American perspective and think good grief you know there's a lot of civil engagement in in Northern Ireland for sure and it's just not here in the United States we're just so we have fallen so far and when you it's only when you read uh even a very troubled society that you realize man we're we're in kind of a worst spot I think um at least today you know not with the violence just yet but the precursors to it are definitely worse at least that's my opinion um and and again this kind of goes back to that societal loading Theory like look man how much more pressure can we take I don't know I don't know man but it's loading man I I just you know maybe it's just me being hyper sensitive to it you know that could definitely be the case because I felt this way for such a long time just going out there and interacting with people and Society you know in your day-to-day life it's like man do you guys feel that pressure you know it just just feels like there's a there's something not right you know it's like a six sense thing like you know and it's not everywhere some places is worse than others and you can definitely see that at least for me I can like feel like there's a difference in you know certain venues and things you know but if you go it's really mostly if you go out during like a work day and there's fewer people you can kind of people watch a little bit more and see people people are just stressed out to the max they're depressed as all get out and everybody's just walking around like you know like like they're just they're just punching the clock waiting to punch the clock you know it's very uh it's very sad to see in society and it's very hard to imagine that um this book kind of neglects to some degree but it's kind of hard to imagine that anybody would ever care uh about anything to be honest uh at this point now I'm not super pessimistic in saying that it's not going to happen uh that the change isn't going to happen in the United States I'm just speaking in the context of of this book here which is that I can't imagine anyone uh you know engaging in paramilitary activity even to defend their own life at this point you know you know the concept of self-defense like it or not like I don't like it right but it's Up For Debate it really is debatable like should I even defend myself at this point you know if you're in a city I know the conservatives and all the you know um people out there in the kind of Defense Community don't want to think about it but man I'm telling you people are thinking it people are telling me that they would rather be assaulted than catch a gun charge in New York and you know thankfully I don't live there so I don't have to make these decisions but man the fact that we're asking these questions you know and and the majority of people have not even tried to engage in you know more civil actions to try to like push back against this is very very telling you know it's it's unfortunate and I don't have a solution for it but but man you know the Irish they were blowing up cars and sniping you know you know checkpoints and things over what by comparison in to America is very trivial it's very trivial they were they were killing each other over I'm sure at the time you know I don't mean to be you know disrespectful to the to the conflict itself but man it sure does seem like by comparison in today's society in America you know you know a bunch of Irishmen a bunch of brothers were killing each other for largely trivial reasons now I'm sure absolutely sure it did not seem trivial at the time but compared to what we hear you know view as something you know man it just raises a lot of questions doesn't it right it really does cause you to think about the world today and you know where we're going um I never thought that we would you know be thinking about these things I thought things would shake out differently but it's it's definitely uh an interesting time that's for sure so you know I think I'm just going to kind of leave things there uh I have a few more notes but you know I'm still thinking about this book I think it again it was a little bit ambitious of us to try to get through this book in in a month um and I'm going to continue I'm going to read it through again um and do some more third party research on it the conflict to kind of revisit this uh later on but you know I I I don't know how to feel about how some of this stuff uh came to be you know I I always because both intentionally and kind of unintentionally we always view history through our own different lens right and most of the time you know nowadays I'm trying to view history through the lens of preparing for the tough times here in the United States right so I'm intentionally doing this I'm intentionally trying to find these little nuggets of information that can of that can kind of help us and sometimes you get to a source like this one and you get to a conflict and you think man this is both helpful and not helpful helpful because it it gets me to think about the political um you know societal loading and for a lack of better term but it's also not helpful because it didn't really give us any solutions uh for this it just kind of petered out right you know how many times have we read through history books of you know group a fighting Group B and Group B fighting group a until they both get tired of killing each other and I would really really really appreciate it if we did not get to that point here in the United States I think most of us would uh even people who you know want to get out there and um encourage uh different kinds of conflict I think that really at the end of the day we we we really do not want that um can we can we write the ship can we turn things around or have we reached our Battle of the bog side uh kind of situation I don't know but I'm inclined to think that we probably have um and that's just not me being pessimistic that's that's me just looking at what happened in 2020 um from a federal standpoint you know I don't think that our can come back from that uh and remain intact there's going to have to if the United States is to remain the United States of America I think we're going to have to have some very significant changes which are not going to happen uh so you know maybe I do think that we've kind of reached this point of no return in some regards um in other regards there's there's plenty of change occurring uh people don't see it because it's not um all the the the the pessimism and negative negativity of you know all the bad stuff in society that gets the clicks right so uh we don't tend to focus on the good things that are happening the fact that you know homeschooling for one has taken a huge huge uh increase over the past few years hey that's requirement number one guys getting your kid out of the education of the state is that's probably a good step you know I know most people can't do it you know I really feel for you but uh you know the people that can are are doing it and and I think that's a good thing so so um you know things things are changing um is it a Net game no but we're doing the best we can I think you know people are looking into alternative Logistics they're looking you know Co caused a lot of people to re reexamine what they want to do in life and and it made people really look at their own careers and say do I want to be associated with these people you know do I want my name to be there when things go down um and a lot of people said no and they and they changed their careers and and we don't hear about that so much um it does happen so you know that's a good thing you know trying to end on kind of a positive note it really is kind of helpful to to take a step back you know and say you know things are are pretty rough here in the United States but um and we may have already reached the point of no return to where you know um things are going to transpire one way or the other but there's still a lot of good things happening there's still a lot of uh quiet things going on uh even though it is not really on a national level um we still see it so I think that's a I think that's a good thing and it's probably a good way to to wrap things up for this time not all of these uh book club uh kind of offerings are going to be super great or super applicable um but I think we've we've learned a lot at least I've learned a lot this time around so um I think we'll call it a day and uh we'll go ahead and move on to the next one so thank you all for watching thank you all for your input on this one um I know it was not a not an easy one this time around but uh it's good to kind of get outside of our comfort zone sometimes so um again thank you all for watching thank you all for your support it really does help I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for you guys uh kind of helping me along and prompting me along the way so thank you all for that so thank you again for watching and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade