Omagh

Narrated account of a social-media 'scholar' (Dartmouth) whose activities in Omagh lead him to both distance(s)...and love.

A social-media era conscious 'faerie-tale' very loosely inspired by the weighty modern film The Devil's Own (Alan J. Pakula). Enjoy, 

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Omagh is where I began my world-studies of the impact of the partition of mainland (Catholic) Ireland after the declaration of the 'Irish Free State' in the early 20th-Century and the formation of the more aggressive guerrilla-group known as the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

My name's Amlan Satan, and I'm a Dartmouth-grad with princely family-ties to the Algerian FLN and Indian independence movements against French-British colonial rule and became interested in Irish media/politics after taking a history course on world-liberation politics. The partition of Catholic-Ireland leading to the formation of Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) which would be composed of an Irish-Catholic minority population living alongside a British-Protestant majority-population living in that tip of mainland Catholic-Ireland as descendants of colonial settlers from England. This partition led to the designation of an Irish-Catholic underemployed under-class and poverty/unemployment issues by the minority-population creating angst and dissatisfaction and eventual IRA-terrorism and armed resistance against British police-military occupation. I decided to move to Omagh (Northern Ireland), one of the few areas of Northern Ireland inhabited mostly by Catholics in an otherwise Protestant-dominanted land-tip. I became a Facebook-chess competitor and advocate of Catholic-Protestant youth co-activities and educational media.

One of my Facebook-chess competitors, a British-Protestant son of a former 'rogue' member of the British-Protestant 'reactionary' force known as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), was concerned about the levels of inter-religious schisms between Catholics-Protestants created by rogue IRA/UVF skirmishes all over Northern Ireland, and he started chatting with me, while we drew a stalemate-chess play on Facebook-chess, about the value of shared English-Irish literature (for social-media/education) catalyzing more 'vivacious' Parliament talks with Sinn Fein (the legal/political negotiating 'branch' of the 'unofficial' IRA!) regarding affirmative-action employment assistance reform programs, favoring the underemployed Catholic underclass in Northern Ireland, that would inspire more 'imaginarium' offerings regarding folk-literature...and the (shared) arts in this new age of social-media IQ.

I started watching/reading sci-fi alien invasion/intelligence media/literature and sharing them with my Facebook-chess opponents/teammates on Facebook-chess, Catholics-Protestants alike, to talk about concepts of species-wide or planetary coexistence/sovereignty imagination in this time of commerce-related globalism rhetoric in the post-9/11 era on Earth. These 'chess-talks' about coexistence activities between Catholics-Protestants in Western civilization for more 'vivacious' species activity inspired me to become a guerrilla-scholar 'advocate' captain of a new underground group known as the Foreign Irish Republican Army, recruiting students who'd not been Irish necessarily but mostly Catholic in inter-religious coexistence and affirmative-action reform consciousness advocacy on social-media in the United Kingdom!

I took the F-IRA cyber-alias 'Storm-Shadow' (GI-Joe comics) and started using folk-comics avatars in the erection of youth Catholic-Protestant chess-clubs on Facebook geared to making affirmative-action employment assistance talks in Parliament feel more educational/youth audience targeted and hence more inter-religious coexistence imaginarium conscious! It felt like a cyber-fielded rendition of modern folk-populism media-politics! It was quite creative/artistic (indeed).

"All this news-imagery regarding the terror(s) of areas like Catholic-Omagh (Northern Ireland) inspire Facebook-chess teamworks" (Chess-Club Member).

All of this cyber-activity inspiration/energy ironically changed in me while in Omagh when I met the beautiful Irish-Catholic librarian Shelbye O'Hara, herself a Harvard-grad, whom I fell in love with instantly and married and who inspired me to seek a more civil and less political life in Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) once I 'carefully' placed/finished my cyber-work with inter-religious coexistence 'guerrilla' analyses/conversationalism on social-media in the new millennium.

SHELBYE: He was a 'captain' of the Foreign Irish Republican Army's chess-club on social-media, but now a 'real' Omagh-groom.

We attended a special folk-celebratory Catholic people's parade in the West and decided that all our activities and energy ironically fueled a 'hybridized' consciousness regarding living politics and community daily-life, and perhaps Shelbye/I can find the new road(s) to shared love/romanticism in this emerged globalism-rhetoric(s) post-9/11 era of great social-media imagery/photos of street/community-life storytelling.

SHELBYE: He was enriched by family-ties history of anticolonial literature and then education-exposure and then social-media but now had been 'transformed' by the world(s) of living Catholic romanticism...a political scholar who became something more of a 'diary' husband...which is the real story here (for all Catholic storytellers!).

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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiasts)