I spent a good part of the summer in the north of Ireland. It’s a beautiful country filled with lovely people, who spent three decades at the end of the last century at odds. In true, understated Irish fashion, they called their season of sectarian violence The Troubles, and in those years, more than 3,700 people were killed, 50,000 wounded, and an entire nation was traumatized.

On the surface, it looked like the Protestants vs. the Catholics. As my friend from Belfast said, “For Christsake, we look like the same people.” He called it the arrogance of small differences and it eventually manifested itself in riots, kidnappings, assassinations, car bombs, and more. At its core, there were issues of empire and oppression and access to jobs, housing, and opportunity. In the day to day, it looked like a country and a people torn apart.

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The Troubles officially ended with the signing of the Good Friday Agreements in 1998, but now 30 years later, deep wounds remain. We interviewed people about their experiences, the slow movements toward peace and healing, and the work that’s left to do.

Here are some of the things I heard while we were there. You stop me when anything sounds familiar:

You can’t trust them.
I won’t talk to those people.
I wouldn’t go to that part of town.
I’m all for peace, but just look at what they have done.
They are the reason we are such a mess.
It was them that started it. I didn’t have a choice.
Say nothing. Trust nobody.

We met Protestants in their 50s who had never met a Catholic. And vice versa. We walked along the 40-foot high walls that still separate Protestant from Catholic neighborhoods. We heard that more than 90% of schools are still segregated by religion.

I’m not really sure who won the conflict over there. I’m reasonably confident that everybody lost.

When we separate ourselves, we lose.
When we scapegoat others, we lose.
When we start down the path of dehumanizing and blaming and retribution, we lose.

The car bombs and assassinations in Northern Ireland have stopped, but the violence hasn’t. We were told that is has moved behind closed doors, in the form of domestic abuse and addiction and high suicide rates.

Charlie Kirk, Melissa and Mark Hortman, the children of Annunciation school…

As we continue our American experiment with violence, my time away in Northern Ireland made clear that it takes very little to destroy the social fabric that holds a society together, and it takes generations to build it back.

We encountered so many people who were doing the hard work of building trust again. Sometimes that looked like personal interventions in places of tension. Sometimes it looked like knitting circles to bring women together from opposite sides of the walls. Sometimes it looked like BIngo games that allowed a place for people to live and laugh side by side with people who they once viewed as adversaries.

It wasn’t always smooth. It was often difficult. And every time we asked people why they kept showing up to do the hard work of reconciliation, the answer was some version of this:

I was so tired of the violence.
I couldn’t keep living like that.
I didn’t want my kids to experience that sort of fear and trauma.

We are in a bad spot, America. Where do we go from here? I’m really asking. I”m asking you. I don’t have a lot of faith in the swirling hot mess of Washing DC to solve this for us. I don’t think the media landscape of people yelling at one another for ratings and profit will get us there. I don’t think the influencers who feed like parasites off our anger and frustration have any inclination to change their methodologies that seem to serve them well as it tears us apart. 

So I’m asking you.

Where do we go from here?

100 times a day, you have the choice. Are you going to fan the flames? Or are you going to turn down the heat? Are you going to take the bait? Or are you going to turn it off? Are you going to throw up your hands and claim that it’s all hopeless? Or are you going to show up and look for the opportunities to make connections and build healing and do the slow, hard work of holding this beautiful, complicated, imperfect, amazing place together?

I’ve seen what I don’t want to happen.
I’ve made my choice.
How about you?