Pause. Take a breath.

In the past few years and, more urgently, in the past months and weeks, some Americans have used the language of division to describe the United States—a "divided society." We are and have been. Using these kinds of labels helps, I think, because they allow us to begin giving language to our problems and then open up possible solutions. We have many fractures. There's not one thing that divides us. In other countries, people speak more freely of identity-based conflicts—sectarian, racial, and ethnic. We, too, have identity-based conflicts—this is one legacy of our unredressed history of racial injustice, violence, and oppression. We are also divided by additional vectors of inequality and we are divided by partisanship.

Although Northern Ireland is a much more peaceful place to live; the sinister fragments of the Troubles have left a terrible legacy. I despair at the countless number of students leaving school with pitiful knowledge and slanted interpretations of their country’s turbulent past. This problem is exacerbated when you consider that a new generation of children are growing up having their identity narrowly defined by the political and sectarian conditions that festered here during the Troubles.