Teaching in Galway

Every day, as I walk my 6-year-old son to school, I memorize what he’s wearing. “Camp Vibes” t-shirt, light blue with red basketball shorts. White t-shirt, stained, with black basketball shorts. Radiohead hoodie (seriously, it’s awesome) with blue basketball shorts. Every day I walk him to school and every day I do this.

Other parents say they do the same for the same reason.

So we can identify their bodies.

I’m thinking of this as I teach in a classroom with an entire wall made of glass that looks out on to the campus of the University of Galway.

Last year, I mentioned it to my students. “We could never have this in America. There’s nowhere to hide from shooters.”

Three days later, 19 students and two teachers were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

At first, I didn’t want to return to America. My son was safer in Ireland. This is an indisputable fact. The cops (or the Garda) don’t even carry guns. That’s one of the most startling things my students notice.

“How do they protect themselves?”

“Almost no one else has a gun,” I tell them. And the Irish are okay with that.

Why shouldn’t they be?

They vote. They buy businesses. They drive cars.  

It’s pretty free, as far as I can tell.

But America is my home and I’m not cut out—personally and financially—to be an expat. And there’s also the sense that leaving America would be giving up on America. Letting the bastards win, to paraphrase the saying.

It’s also why study abroad programs are crucial to college students and travel—international travel specifically—is so eye opening to Americans. The way we live isn’t the only way to live.

If you come to Ireland, you’ll find a nation that overthrew its colonial overlord a hundred years earlier and then spent the following 80 years in on again off again armed conflict to maintain their independence. Yet the cops don’t carry guns. And their children are free to go to school without lockdown drills. A freedom I wish we had.

Galway, 2022