Welcome to the Terrordome

As I write this it is 10 years to the day that some religious nutters killed 3000 people a few blocks from where I am sitting. I remember the day very clearly (as does anyone who was in New York that day) but I am not going to talk about that, I've done it here before and the time has come to move on.

The only thing that makes this year any different from the last 9 is that it falls on a multiple of 5. Oh and the Iraq Body Count now stands at 111,937. That is approximately 37.31 times 9/11. Note, that is only Iraq. I didn't include the dead in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else that has been bombed to smithereens in the last decade. Iraq Body Count also only includes verifiable civilian deaths, the real number is probably a lot higher.

A lot of friends have been posting updates on Facebook along the lines of "Never Forget", I personally have no problem with that but lets stop living in the past and take a look at the present and the future.

This future is being presented to me right now outside the front door. Cops and men with machine guns behind barricades everywhere. It reminds me of my first visit to Belfast in the late 1980's except that this is no occupying force, this is our very own elected representatives doing it for "our safety".

Sure, I don't doubt that there are nutters out there who would like nothing better than to blow something up today but how is that any different from yesterday or next Tuesday. If those fuckers really want to do it they will, you can flood Downtown Manhattan with all the cops and army personnel you want and they'll probably blow something up in Pittsburgh.

Once you come to this realization then you understand that the cops and army folk all around you with their big guns are only there to provide the illusion of security. Sometimes it is an illusion that doesn't even make sense, over the course of the last week I have seen army guys with M-16 machine guns standing around inside crowded train stations. What the hell good are those guns in an enclosed and crowded space? They aren't any good, it's just an illusion.

I don't want this to come off as an anti-authoritarian post, it's not. I am well aware of the fact that many of the people who lost their lives that day were police and firemen who rushed into the building to try and save others. The cops and the firemen are not the problems here, the politicians are. Hell, the first responders aren't even invited to today's ceremony.

Bloomberg, Guilliani, Dubya, Obama and all the rest of the politicians just want their photo opportunity and a chance to cry crocodile tears. They need to do this to justify all the wars and people they have killed since that day. I hate to sound so cynical but it really bothers me and after 10 years it has the appearance of nothing but taking advantage of other people's grief.

They say the world became a more dangerous place on September 12th 2001, I call bullshit, it's no more dangerous than it was on September 10th 2001. The only thing that changed was our perception, finally our foreign policies came home to roost and we didn't like it.

The Injustices of the Kindergarten Experience.

It's the last day of summer and tomorrow my daughter will start kindergarten. It seems like only yesterday that she was still learning to walk so it's a little shocking to my poor time-lapsed brain that 5 years have passed since she was born and I don't even remember changing my underpants let alone the whole "Oh shit, here comes school" thing.

Kindergarten aka "Primary 1" to the Scots reading this is really the point where your memory actually starts to kick in and you start retaining stuff. She will see and do stuff this year that she will remember for the rest of her life, at least that was the way it was for me.

Primary 1 for me was when I learned that sometimes the world can be very unfair and that justice is definitely subjective to the whims of a probably half-drunk mad catholic teacher.

It all started in the playground where my friend Paul Clark started a "pile-on". This is where a kid grabs another kid that they either do not like, or just enjoy bullying, and wrestles them to the ground. At which point a third kid will scream "pile-on" and everybody will jump on top of the two kids on the ground.

It's a stupid thing to do really as the bully is quite often just as badly crushed as the original target and the amount of bodies with flailing legs and arms will easily take out some of those already loose baby-teeth.

Anyway so Paul starts a pile-on and I'm having nothing to do with it but this girl Patricia Rafferty comes barging into me and I fall into the pile of bodies somewhere in the middle. Some kids are screaming, more kids are laughing and I am just trying to wriggle free as I wanted nothing to do with this.

Unfortunately, just as I wriggle free and stand up, Mrs MacDonald the Primary 1 teacher comes running out the classroom screaming blue bloody murder at us. She knows the drill, the bodies towards the bottom of the pile are the perpetrators and the person on the very bottom is the victim.

I figure I am going to be alright as I see her wade into the bodies and start pulling people out. She grabs Paul Clark by the ear and pulls him to his feet, then to my horror, she starts making a beeline for me and grabs me by the ear too before dragging us both to the headmasters office.

I protest: "Miss, Miss, I didnae have anyhing to dae wae it! Ah was only standing by and I goat knocked intae the pile".

"Likely story McGrath. I saw you climbing out from under the pile of bodies" she said.

I realized then that if I had just waited it out I would have been in the anonymous group of arms and limbs and I would not have been singled out. Instead I had scampered out and caught her attention.

"I wisnae Miss, honest ah wisnae!".

She dragged us both by the ear down the long corridor towards the headmasters office and made us sit outside on these two big leather chairs while she went inside and spoke to Mr Budis, the long suffering head master.

Directly opposite the headmasters office was the staff room where the teachers took their break and where my Mum, a teacher of the Primary 5 class, was sitting. I prayed to Jesus, the Pope and all the "black babies" I'd ever given money to help me now. If my Mum came out the staff room while I was sitting there I was dead for sure.

Paul was sitting alongside me sniffing and crying and saying "Ah dinnae want to go in there, he's goannie belt us" and I was sitting sniffing and crying and saying "Ah wantae git in there before ma mam comes out the staff room and kills me dead right where I'm sitting".

In the end we both didn't get our wishes. Just as Mr Budis opened his door and beckoned us in, the staff room door opened and my Mum walked out from a gigantic cloud of cigarette smoke just to see the back of me going into the office.

She said "Just a minute" and turned me round to check it was me, then she said "I'll talk to you later" in that tone of voice that really means "You're dead!". At that point I knew anything Mr Budis did was going to be easy to deal with compared to what waited at home.

Mr Budis said "Come in boys and stand against the wall".

We walked inside and stood where we were told. Mrs MacDonald stood in the back of the room giving us the evil eye. She was obviously enjoying herself.

"Put your hands out, one on top of the other" he said, then he reached into the drawer of his desk and pulled out his leather strap.

"Waaaaah!" Paul cried and started shaking before anything had even happened. I didn't cry because I was now getting furious. I hadn't had anything to do with the pile-on, nothing at all, I knew this was a serious injustice.

"HANDS OUT IN FRONT OF YOU!" Mr Budis shouted. We meekly put our hands out in front.

Mr Budis swung the strap at Paul first and Paul's self-preservation instinct made him pull his hands back so the strap missed entirely. "HANDS OUT NOW!" Budis screamed and brought the strap down a second time, this time it made contact with Paul's hand and he screamed in pain.

"OKAY, YOUR TURN" he said to me. I stood there fuming but kept my hands out. He brought the strap down and it stung like mad but I was so angry at the injustice I managed to suppress my yelp and only my eyes teared up.

This went on 5 more times and almost every time Paul pulled his hand away whilst I just stood there and took it. I managed to get through all "Six of the belt" without crying and I felt good at not having given them the satisfaction.

It definitely hurt physically but it hurt much much more mentally. For the first time I learned that justice is not always fair and the good guy does not always win. A pretty depressing thing to find out when you are 5 years old.

My anger lasted for the rest of the day and I guess I was still angry when my Mum finished teaching and came to take me home. She asked me what had happened and I told her the whole story, the CORRECT version, and that I'd had nothing to do with the pile-on. There must have been something about my tone of voice because to my amazement she believed me and marched me back into school where she confronted Mrs MacDonald over her version of events. I was left to sit outside the classroom and I could hear them arguing inside, two colleagues arguing not just Mother to Teacher. After 10 minutes Mrs MacDonald came outside and apoligized to me. She said she had talked to Paul Clark and he'd told her I had nothing to do with it. I knew she hadn't, she'd only been talking to my Mum and Mum had straightened her out.

I went home in the car that night with mixed emotions. I was completely baffled and annoyed and upset that things do not always work out the same way they do at the end of children's comics with the good guy winning, but at the same time I was very proud of myself for not crying when I was getting belted and even more proud of my Mum for sticking up for me.

She was a good lady. Thanks Mum.


* As a post-script to this, it just came back to me that I was at my Mum's funeral and an old lady came up to me in the Church. She said "You must be David" and I said "Yes" but I had no idea who she was. She said "I'm Mrs MacDonald, I was your Primary 1 teacher".

Fucking. hell, the old bat must have making sure Mum was actually dead.

In a consumerist paradise, everything is compromised.

This morning I had to buy myself a new ipod charger so I took a stroll along Church St past all the little shopfronts that sell knock-off versions of products. Eventually I found one selling the charger I needed for $10. Deal! I took it home, plugged it in and it worked perfectly. A real Apple charger would have cost me twice the price at least.

After my ipod was charged up I started looking at this thing and I immediately felt bad that I had bought a knocked off version. Who knows who made this thing and what kind of conditions they had to work under. Also, who knows where the money goes? Criminal gangs? Religious nutters? It could only be bad.

But then I started thinking about Foxconn, the Chinese company who manufacture Apple products among other things. This is the REAL product. The one with the logo on the side of it and people are still dying to get it to your big box store shelf.

Which one is worse? I can't decide. Sure the criminal gangs who are probably running the knock-offs have other horrible things going on, prostitution, human trafficking and general religious fucknuttery. Sounds bad right?

It does, but when you start looking at these people from a moral standpoint and you realize that they have no morals, then you feel you should contrast it with a company that is supposed to provide decent working conditions, a living wage and working hours that won't make you jump out the fucking window.

The company is supposed to have morals. They have to be held to a different standard than a criminal gang. It's the same way governments and the rule of law are supposed to be held to a different standard than terrorists - Governments don't kill civilians on purpose, terrorists do.

Companies unfortunately use the same excuse that governments do when it comes to this sort of stuff. We didn't know, it was our contractor, we'll get them to end the offensive practices immediately, etc, etc. It applies to Foxconn as it applies to Blackwater and the CEO or President doesn't know anything about it.

It's all rubbish of course.

So as a consumer how do you live with yourself when you start thinking about this stuff? I do try to consume as little as possible but admittedly I do own branded products and I do like some branded products over others (Apple - insert free Ipad 2 here). I just don't like my products to have blood on them.