From the Comments to “A Problem From Hell”, below. Justin is an Irish software engineer based in California; Caitríona is an Irish human rights worker based in Iran.

So how do we do a better job of putting the Justins in touch with the Caitríonas? We need a matchmaking service to hook up tech professionals with the dedicated field workers who need help. (New York Cares is a good example of a matchmaker service for volunteers.)

The open source community is engaged and civic-minded, and clearly capable of building tools remotely. Product managers (like me) could ask NGO field workers what they need, helping them to build a collection of “user stories”, Extreme Programming style, for volunteer engineers to work on in their spare time.

Any examples out there of this working already? Perhaps the ambitious JHAI Remote Villages project, where Linux meets Laos.

In Dingle and Connemara, the road signs—bilingual elsewhere—lapse into monoglot gibberish for Tim. These are Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking regions.
    “What does that one say?” he asks, exasperated.
    “‘Bridge Out Ahead’,” I say, and giggle. Actually, it says Slow Down: tóg bog é, literally, take it softly.

Sometimes he tries to read the signs in broad, slow Canadian, which makes me laugh more. This language does not yield easily (my name is written “Dearbhaile” in Irish). It is full of conditional tenses, inflected nouns, and strange sub-dialects. It can sound Scandinavian, sometimes even like Hebrew. There are no words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’, which accounts for our national reluctance to commit. “Are you well?” we say, and “I am”, is the answer.

Irish language study is compulsory in state schools. Those born here are not admitted to university without a second-level qualification in Gaeilge, and regardless of your subject, you may not teach in the Irish education system without it (to the frustration of otherwise-qualified EU nationals). Given that we study it every school day for fourteen years, our competence on graduation is generally low.

In Dingle I visited the handsome grave of Peig Sayers, scourge of my generation of secondary school students. She was one of the last remaining islanders on the Blaskets, and her whiny-old-lady memoirs were compulsory exam material. She didn’t exactly speak to our new Ireland. Over two years of study, we defaced our textbooks by doodling “PEIG” into “BITCH”. My friend Seán, one of the most talented teachers I know, sighs now at the slog of forcing Irish on us:
    “Teaching English at least you know that some of them love it, and they’ll remember those books. With Irish you have to lift them up and carry them through the exams.”

Walking from Ventry Harbour around to Dunquin, we met an old man limping down the road. He wore a rusty black suit and sandals with his socks.
    “God be with you,” I said to him in Irish, and he seemed delighted.
    “God and Mary be with you,” he said, “and where are you from?”
I stuttered that I was from Limerick and Tim was from Canada, edging up on the limits of my language after such a long absence. He pointed out the Great Blasket Island, which we couldn’t miss, and Inis Tuaisceart beside it, an fear marbh, the dead man. Inis Tuaisceart does indeed look exactly like a man stretched out for a wake; a memento mori in a part of the world rugged enough not to need one.

Our friend rolled up his trouser leg. He had to take a walk along the road every day now since the house collapsed and his knee was so badly injured. The operation was last year, and he didn’t feel healed yet. Did I see the scar? And what were our names? His name was Pádraig O’Bríain. Was I cold now, wearing that big ski jacket and hat and it a fine day?

He had very little English. I answered him in halting pidgin. I’d had fuller conversations in the Ecuadorian Andes than I could manage here.

Afterwards, Tim asked if I thought it was right that Irish was required in school. I don’t know. I can’t imagine seeing our road signs as he does. The English transliterations mean nothing, but the Irish names underneath tell the stories of our places. Though people were forced to learn English in the era of the Penal Laws, the native language was smuggled through into English. It is the direct translations from Irish that make the English spoken here unique in its rhythms and constructions. Knowing Irish gives me a much deeper sense of the layers of this place.

Then again, I pick up languages easily and enjoy feck-acting about with words. Not everyone does. I wouldn’t have studied it if it weren’t compulsory, and I don’t know if it should be forced on everyone at great state expense. There is outcry here at present that Irish is about to be struck off the list of official will not be added to the list of EU working languages. The enlarging union will be swamped with tiny languages. Minority languages seem isolating to me, no matter how good the Scandanavians and Dutch are at speaking TV English. I feel lucky that my mother tongue opens up the world. Irish is a luxury; worthwhile, but still a luxury.

As Tim observed in Connemara, “Everything is in Irish around here, until they want to sell something. Then they don’t bother with anything but English.”

Meetup is looking for an experienced freelance/contract graphic designer to work on a complete expansion and overhaul of the service. This is a great project for a New York-based designer—I know a few of you stop by here from time to time. Check out http://www.meetup.com/jobs/.

Well, sorry, but bear with me. From Andie in Capetown comes a link to great interview with Samantha Power. Her book, A Problem From Hell, deserves readers, but according to this isn’t getting them in spite of all its awards. Her description of her own political awakening goes towards explaining why:
“The easy thing—which I have done for most of my life—is to block the facts out. Once you are in a position where you have to process the facts, you are stuck.”

From Birnbaum’s introduction:

The United States has never in its history intervened to stop genocide and has in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.”
—Samantha Power, “A Problem From Hell”

At college, my best friend Caitríona studied History and Politics. I got Hob-Nob crumbs on the western canon, and wondered how she crawled through those dull books. She went to Bosnia after we graduated, and wore white Levi’s as her UN observer uniform. Afterwards, in Boston, she won a Fulbright scholarship to study Balkan conflict resolution, which I rarely asked her about for fear she would tell me. She went back to Bosnia. This time she lived in Tuzla, near where General Mladic had executed more than 7,000 men in a UN “safe area”. She worked for a group called Physicians for Human Rights. They gathered forensic evidence from the Srebrenica massacre so that each case could be prosecuted as a murder. She spoke daily with the widows and families, trying to reunite them with the bodies of their missing, murdered men. She drew media attention to the work they were doing, and needed to do. Later, she was called as an expert witness at the first war crimes tribunal held at the International Court in The Hague.

I spent those years caught up in the New York internet culture. I read The Economist, but often as not I skipped the depressing International news section. Why bother? I worked long hours, made more money than I needed, and puffed up on the importance of the startup company that grew out of my living room. The word “revolution” appeared in the business plan and nobody laughed. We used to call late-night code “hero check-ins”. CEOs studied The Art of War. When bad things happened to go projects, I would say “Babies won’t die, kids.”

Twice I went to visit Caitríona in The Hague, after she broke her back when knocked off her bike on the way to her first week at the tribunal. I met her friends: human rights lawyers, activists, and war reporters. Their intensity reminded me of the geeky evangelists in my world, only more so. They were animated as they tried to explain what had happened, who had stood aside, who was evil, why this mattered. All night I couldn’t get the Bowie song out of my head: “This ain’t rock and roll. This is…GENOCIDE.” I concentrated on getting the names of the generals right, and failed. These old Yugoslavia hands struck me as institutionalised, addicted to the intensity of a war zone, unable to let go. They drank too much. They acted like this was life and death.

I had never visited Cait in Bosnia, though she was there for three years. I was afraid. I wanted to spend my few holidays in comfort. I didn’t want to know about this unpleasant world, and I didn’t want to feel guilty for doing nothing to improve it. She came to me instead, in busy, glitzy, boomtown New York. I showed her my new toys and lectured her on the wireless revolution. I worried that she didn’t earn enough, that she lived in horrible conditions, that she dealt with decomposing bodies and desperate widows every day. She has always had an uncanny ability to interest influential people, and I thought she should use that to her own advantage, for once.

I was booted out of that New York life just as I turned thirty. I could only afford to travel in cheap countries, so I started to go to the kinds of places that Caitríona had studied and lived in. I wept in the War Crimes Museum in Saigon. Why, I wondered, had Cambodia turned out like this? What was wrong with Bolivia? With Burma? Politics, which I had seen as a dull, corrupt abstraction, began to seem real at last. In Laos, a sixteen-year-old monk said, “Why did America bomb my village?” I didn’t know how to explain the Domino Theory to a kid from the Plain of Jars.

I gave up most novels and scrounged books to puzzle it out. I read The Quiet American. William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. Robert McNamara’s confession. Air America. The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War. Norman Lewis’s Indochina books. Aung San Suu Kyi’s Letters from Burma. War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges.

They told me, over and over, that bloodbaths and famines are rarely unexpected or inevitable; that wars are usually caused by a very tiny number of influential people; that genocide can often be prevented by a very tiny number of influential people, but rarely is; that the law of unintended consequences leads to catastrophe in geopolitics. It was fresh news.

Duh.

As a Christmas present this year, Caitríona gave me “A Problem from Hell” : America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power. Power is a friend of hers from their Bosnia days, and she is Irish too, though she moved to the US when she was nine. She is 33; fabulously young to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book award, but this book deserves all its praise. I couldn’t wish for a more patient teacher to sew together the scraps of an education I picked up in the last few years. In one chapter, for example, she sets out how the United States directly created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge to come to power, and then looked away as Pol Pot killed almost a third of his own countrymen in under three years. It was left to Vietnam, still reeling itself, to invade and overthrow Pol Pot—but since they were on the “wrong” side in the Cold War, the US and the UN continued to recognise the Khmer Rouge for many years after the Killing Fields had been dug up for the west. Her charges are clear and devastating.

She believes that much of the misery of the last century was predicted in advance and could have been averted. Failure to stop it was due not to ignorance but to considered decisions not to intervene. Referring to the many instances of genocide in the last hundred years, she says that “No US president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.”

Several heroic figures did work to oppose and expose ethnic cleansing as it took place, but the quiet majority of American politicians chose always to do nothing, as did the American public.

I am ashamed to be a silent voice in that majority.

Caitríona lives in Iran now, with her American husband Dan, who writes for the Guardian and The Economist. She and I just spent a few days together here in Limerick, catching up after too long apart, as usual. She had come back from a Christmas trip to the US and Dublin, and felt down. People couldn’t understand why she and Dan were still caught up in their little human rights kick. In New York, friends who “made a window” barely asked about Iran; they were busy telling her about the ups and downs of their own careers. In California, their family wanted to know when they were going to come back to America and start living like proper, middle-class adults.

Iran is not easy. She tells me about the men who scream obscenities and sexual come-ons in the street, no matter how modest her hejab, and about the rich Tehran women who talk of little but cosmetic surgery and clothes. Her phone is bugged. She caught typhoid. Still, she presses on, and will continue to, like Mary Robinson before her. As well as reporting for the Irish media, she volunteers helping victims of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons attacks; the Iranian women and children who were unlucky enough to be on the side not supported by the Americans. Sixteen years later, they have been long forgotten by all but the few like Caitríona.

From The Writer’s Almanac, a daily newsletter from Minnesota Public Radio:

Ranger Tim’s daily Brooklyn report:

I’ve never voted in a democratic election. For non-resident aliens, the US goes in for taxation without representation. Since the age of majority I’ve haven’t lived in my country of citizenship during an election, though I think I could have voted in the UK election that delivered a landslide to my Islington neigbour, Tony Blair. Ireland does not offer voting rights to its diaspora, which is okay. Now that most of us leave by choice, I’m not convinced that out-of-touch emigrants, paying taxes to other states, should be allowed to shape the country.

Colum McCann, the novelist, was interviewed on Irish radio last week about the Democratic primaries. (Ireland believes that fiction writers are sound choices as political pundits.) He was passionate, though not particularly articulate, on behalf of various downtrodden groups. Yeah, but they’re screwed, Colum, I found myself thinking. They don’t vote. Countries get the governments they deserve.

In America, the office goes to the candidate who can raise the money to beam most messages to television viewers. It is hugely expensive to speak through TV networks, and the scale of this money race scares me. How can corporate fundraising not taint everyone it touches? In part I am looking forward to working for Meetup because their service enables political engagement—and fundraising—on a human scale again. Several candidates have learned to use it to bring real people into their campaigns. Meetup is outside politics, but helping voters to come face-to-face can only be a good thing.

Every election, a new voter block is annointed with the power to swing the race. These are the people the TV ads dance for. Thatcher’s C2 Essex boys. Soccer moms. Blue-collar males. California Latinos. Seniors. The paltry modern turnout is easily dominated by interest groups who can get out the vote. But what if everyone voted? What if candidates had to address every franchised adult, not just those likely to turn out voluntarily? Jury duty and income tax are compulsory. So is filling out the national census. Why not voting in national elections? (You could check “Abstain” if so inclined.)

I have no idea what this silent majority would say, though I’d love to hear. Millions died for democracy in the 20th century, but many of those of us who grow up with it are too lazy to care. Is the very idea of compulsory voting anti-democratic? In the west, we think a lot about our rights, especially as Tom Ridge erodes them. It may be time to start on an overdue Bill of Responsibilities.

This NY Times story from last week proves further that the USCIS is in a foul mood these days. Reminds me of the old Lou Reed song:

Give me your poor, your huddled masses, I’ll spit on ‘em
That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says.

The New York economy is thawing even as Jamaica Bay freezes. My future employers at Meetup are looking for several more people: a Lead Developer, a Systems Administrator, a MarComm manager, a VP of Partnerships, and an Account Manager.

They are good people, the Meetup crew; decent and patient enough to wait out the US Immigration Service with me. If you’re interested in finding out more, visit their jobs page.