About “The Age of Terror: On This Day--8/11/87,” SBS TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. 30 June 2009.

RonPrice

We all sift the events of our times through the hour-glass of our own lives, our historical perspectives, our personal cosmology, our fundamental orientations to life, our personal interests and the conveniences and various agenda that impinge on our time. And so it is that when a series of programs on terrorism come onto TV, as they are at present, we each have our own reaction if, indeed, we watch the series at all.-Ron Price, Tasmania
ON THIS DAY

It is not my intention in this prose-poem to deal with the early centuries of Irish history and culture—the pre-Christian period, with the arrival of Christianity in the 5th century, with the flowering--the golden age of Irish culture and learning in early Christianity in Ireland, with the interruption by 200 years of intermittent warfare with waves of Viking raiders, with the seven centuries of tension with Ireland’s powerful neighbouring island across the sea, with the many modern traumas in the long modern history of Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the rise of political violence in northern Ireland since the 1960s, with the history of the IRA or with the particular, specialized and recent history of British-Irish relations, among the multitude of features of Irish society, culture and history. A course on modern Irish history, involving the sociology and psychology of Ireland, indeed, a broad interdisciplinary study, would cover most or all of these aspects of the Irish experience in a broad sweep of topics and readings. -Ron Price with thanks to several modern Irish history syllabi on the internet and “The Age of Terror-Episode 2: On This Day--8 November 1987,” SBS TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. 30 June 2009.

Acts of Injustice Done
Between the Setting and the Rising Sun
In History Lie Like Bones,
Each One.
—W.H. Auden
-------------------------------------------------

Last night I watched dramatic events
of ten days of terrorism during 11/87
when a bomb exploded in the small
town of Enniskillen in the County of
Fermanagh, planted by the IRA, killing
11 people. I was living through my own
bomb-shell activity in northern Australia
—trying to survive in my own war and in
12/87 moved from South Headland to the
city of Perth Western Australia for a final
dozen years of full-time work as a teacher
at the end of my life & 50 classroom-years.

During those next 12 years the Berlin Wall
fell in 1989, an epochal moment in modern
history, presaging the collapse of the Soviet
Communism and elevating capitalism into an
unrivalled global command suddenly freeing
it of a serious modern and global competitor-
ideology, with a backdrop of a digital and an
information revolution which I had linked my
own work to by 1999 when micro-soft/goggle
gave me all I needed to fight the spiritual war
I had been fighting since the ‘50s: ill-defined,
with the forces of the left and right, with my
own ideal forces & confirmations rushing to
my support-reinforcement with all the doors
open, many impregnable castles razed to the
ground and carrying my attack to the centre
of the powers of this planetized-new earth.1

1 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 1977(1919), pp.47-48.

Ron Price
1 July 2009