Gosdot

The following e-mail exchange occured between myself and Michael White on Aug 27 and 28th in response to my post “Day Five – Rotten”. He was very supportive and had some very interesting points…

Oh John,

I hate to dash your illusions but the Irish can be very
racist. The young Irish from elite homes subscribe to
PC but unlike Americans, don’t have the experience of
proximity or sense that they are part of the history
and culture. This isn’t so, and for all the
politically correct Irish you may meet here, in the
working class areas of Cork, Galway, Limerick, Belfast
and Dublin you can endure plenty of casual, even
violent, racial abuse. Black football players are
often subjected to ape impressions from the crowd. No,
sorry, you won’t escape that bullshit entirely here,
either.

Best,
Mike

Mike,

Thanks for the insight, Carlo. Yes, I understand that
every country in Europe has it’s own history and own
racial tensions. It’s an unfortunate thing but
ofcourse these things exist in life.

Right now I’m in Estonia and there are similar tensions
between Estonians and Russians and other ethnicities
and nationalities. I’m not trying to open the
pandoras box of debates here but as a traveler these
things affect my choices in where I’ll go, where I’ll
tell other people they should go and highly reflects
upon the particular country as a whole.

Fortunately, I’ve got relatively thick skin so things
like this don’t necessarily bother me. As a writer,
though, I’d be a liar if I didn’t relate the truth!

Thanks again for your input!

- Jon

Yes, you’re spot on there, as the Brits and Irish say.
Europe is full of all sorts of minor racial
resentments, religious bigotry, etc. Like anywhere,
really. I’ve experience some of the Polentone /
Terrone thing in southern Italy, too. But in Europe
the European Union has come about, I think, from what
these coundtries learned by their ruinous experience
of two world was in the last century. Cooperation was
born from that, the Common Market…and now the EU
reaches from Finland to Belorussia and the Black Sea.
None of that could have come about had insightful men
and women not pulled civilization back from the ashes.
It took remarkable cooperation. All in all, Euope is an
exciting place to live for this. Over 250,000 Poles
live and work in Ireland, since the last accession of
ten states in 2004. Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia come
in this January. It’s amazing. I’m a child of the Cold
War baby boomers and never in my life did I think I’d
see a democratic Europe as a federation in my lifetime.
But then I’m still a bit in shock over the events of
1989. Meanwhile, Bush seems to represent some
barbarian warlord leading an alliance of American
imperialists who want to dictate to the whole world
and the religious right who want foreign policy to
help the Apocalypse along! Seriously, these kooks
think Israel will be the stepping stone for the Second
Coming! I have to tell you, if the Democrats don’t win
the House in November that old ideal of American
Democracy will be but a memory. The odds are on the
side of sanity. Americans no longer trust Bush and
they’re sick of hearing the same drone about
Supporting Our Troops (by expending them in a useless
army of occupation, presumably).

Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts. All the best.
Couchsurgers is great. This week I host a Croation
woman and the week after I have a Malaysian-Chinese
student, visiting the cliffs of Moher, I think.

Ciao,
Mike

Very interesting and fairly accurate take on America.
The problem is that only about 25% of our population
resides in major metropolitan, progressive cities and
states. There is alarmingly large portion of America
that is simply disconnected from what the rest of the
country is feeling. That’s how Bush was re-elected.
After his first term if you had asked people in any
city or anyone in the media, it seemed like there was
no way in hell Bush would win. It seemed like Kerry
would win by a landslide. There were Anti-Bush
stickers and sentiments everywhere.

Then middle America had their say. On top of all of
this, our Electoral College system is outdated and I
feel it no longer works to to the benefit of the
country. If bush didn’t win the majority of the
population’s votes (and he didn’t), then he shouldn’t
be president. The archaic system of telling a whole
state it voted one way because the majority of the
votes in the state leaned one way is senseless.
Especially when most voting districts, directly
coorelate to different tax districts (which tend to be
drawn very segregated anyways).

- Jon