Illustration by Mice Hell
Eoin O’Liatháin
Contributing Writer
I spent my Summer in the USA, living in North Virginia and interning in a gun control lobby group in Washington D.C. It was a fantastic way to spend the Summer months and one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.
The reason I was there was because of the Washington Ireland Program. It’s basically a cross-border initiative aimed at promoting service and leadership among young people. Each year WIP takes thirty students from Ireland (north and south) to Washington D.C. for eight weeks for personal and professional development. So for two months of the summer you go live in a different country, with a host family, in a new job and along with 30 new friends. Put like that it sounds like a witness protection programme but it’s honestly one of the best things I’ve ever done. I did and saw so much and made great new life friends. Hooray.
When I first heard I had gotten onto the Program I was delighted because I was unbelievably desperate to get out of Dublin. I had spent all the previous summer here (never a good idea) and was getting dangerously claustrophobic about Dublin city. I had never been the States before so a chance to go to the nation’s capitol in an election year would be a great way of being introduced to the USA. I found D.C. to be a beautiful city awash with everybody’s favorites: lawyers, public servants and lobbyists. In summary, the people are friendly, society is unequal, and the temperatures run high. While there I tried to squeeze in as many all-American activities as possible. I went to baseball games, saw Batman in iMax, visited New York City, Capitol Hill, the Lincoln memorial, Ford’s Theatre, the White House, Holocaust Memorial Museum and any other local site that ever featured on The West Wing.
Like the thousands of other college students that flock there every Summer I was slave labour, I mean interning. For me my masters were the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. They’re a gun-control lobby group aiming at reducing the horrendous, I repeat, horrendous levels of gun violence in the States. Working there gave me a real insight to American culture. Constitutional debates, dealing with the rhetoric of the National Rifle Association and working towards legislation for tighter gun control were all part and parcel of the job. From an Irish perspective the whole setup over there is just insane. Personally, I get weirded out when I see airport police with guns but in America anybody, including ex-cons, can go to a gun show and buy an AK-47 and as much ammunition as they want. Why somebody would need an AK-47 I have no idea. Last time I checked deer are not that evolutionarily advanced. One of my jobs while working there was to update a list of mass shootings dating back since 2005. By the time I was finished it was 62 pages long. Guns are a tenuous issue politically in the US. The democrats see it as too risky an issue to touch quite frankly. That sort of changed when I was just two weeks into the job on account of the shootings at the batman movie showing in Aurora, Colorado. Following that tragedy the issue has regained a lot of political momentum. Media pundits, politicians, and citizens all spoke out about the tragedy and the need for a real discussion on the issue. The hope is that there might be an assault-weapon ban on the books for an Obama second-term.
Speaking of which, there’s great buzz in DC about Decision 2012. The general feeling is that it’s going be a very tight election. It’s remarkable to think that the battle is actually only being waged over 8% of the vote. 46% of people on either side have their mind made up and always have. They are either Democrat or they are Republican; not much would change that. So billions of dollars are being spent over a tiny minority in a few key states. My money is on Obama clinching it. I also cannot wait to see Romney speak off the cuff in the upcoming debates. Some guffaws are inevitable.
A major feature of this particular election is the amount of SuperPac money being spent on campaigning. On TVs at home, at work or in bars attack ads constantly inform you why you shouldn’t vote for the other guy: “He’s a flip-flopper”, “he’s bad on foreign policy”, “he’s the anti-christ. I got talking to the guy who runs Obama’s SuperPac ‘Priorities USA Action’ – how that name got approved I’ll never know. Basically his job is to ring people up and ask politely for a million dollars. Neat. Anyway, he shared an interesting thought. Apparently despite people always complaining about the amount of negative campaigning it’s actually consistently been shown by focus groups that it’s one of the most effective ways of influencing people’s voting decisions. Go figure. Consequently, attack, attack, attack is the strategy used by all.
A final but saddening difference I found in leaving Dublin was discovering that the Trinity Liberal Bubble is just that – a bubble, finite and precious. On the Program I interacted with a lot of young intelligent people from north and south of Ireland. Many were rural, many were conservative. The divergence of their opinions on social issues compared to the overriding narrative in Trinity made me stand out like some crazy liberal hippy. Views on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption were positively bigoted. It reminded me that Ireland is still generally a conservative country and that it’s very easy to get lost within the walls of Trinity, the hallowed, hallowed walls.
So, eh, good to be back!
All in all Summer in DC was awesome. At times I got lonely. I missed family, missed friends, and missed Spar’s 1.99 chicken fillet rolls. But in detaching myself from familiarity and falling deeply into another American culture I learned so much and will never forget Summer 2012.
