David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

face of a major crime wave, that she was going to start hugging and feeding the families of the criminals roaming the streets, you’d be speechless—right? Well, take a look at what happened in Brownsville.

    When Leites and Wolf wrote that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism,” they meant that the power of the state was without limits. If you wanted to impose order, you didn’t have to worry about what those whom you were ordering about thought of you. You were above that. But Leites and Wolf had it backwards. What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them—that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.
    That was the mistake General Freeland made in the Lower Falls. He didn’t look at what was happening through the eyes of people like Rosemary Lawlor. He thought he’d ended the insurgency when he rode around the hushed streets of the Lower Falls like a British Raj on a tiger hunt. Had he bothered to drive up the street to Ballymurphy, where Harriet Carson was banging the lids of pots and saying, “Come on, come out, come out. The people in the Lower Falls are getting murdered,” he would have realized the insurgency was just beginning.

5.
    July in Northern Ireland is the height of what is known as “marching season,” when the country’s Protestant Loyalists organize parades to commemorate their long-ago victories over the country’s Catholic minority. There are church parades, “arch, banner and hall” parades, commemorative band parades, and “blood and thunder” and “kick-the-Pope” flute band parades. There are parades with full silver bands, parades with bagpipes, parades with accordions, and parades with marchers wearing sashes and dark suits and bowler hats. There are hundreds of parades in all, involving tens of thousands of people, culminating every year in a massive march on the twelfth of July that marks the anniversary of the victory by William of Orange in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when Protestant control over Northern Ireland was established once and for all.
    The night before the Twelfth, as it is known, marchers around the country hold street parties and build enormous bonfires. 3 When the fire is at its height, the group chooses a symbol to burn. In past years, it has often been an effigy of the Pope or some hated local Catholic official. Here’s how one Twelfth ditty goes, sung to the tune of “Clementine”:
    Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
    Stick a Catholic on the top,
    Put the Pope right in the middle,
    And burn the fucking lot. 4
    Northern Ireland is not a large country. Its cities are dense and compact, and as the Loyalists march by each summer in their bowler hats and sashes with flutes, they inevitably pass by the neighborhoods of the people whose defeat they are celebrating. The central artery of Catholic West Belfast is, in places, no more than a few minutes’ walk from the street that runs through the heart of Protestant West Belfast. There are places in Belfast where the houses of Catholics back directly onto the backyards of Protestants, in such close proximity that each house has a giant metal grate over its backyard to protect the inhabitants against debris or petrol bombs thrown by their neighbors. On the night before the Twelfth, when Loyalists lit bonfires around the city, people in Catholic neighborhoods would smell the smoke and hear the chants and see their flag going up in flames.
    In marching season, violence always erupts in Northern Ireland. One of the incidents that began the Troubles was in 1969 after two days of riots broke out when a parade passed through a Catholic neighborhood. When the marchers went home, they went on a rampage through the streets of West Belfast, burning down scores of homes. 5 The gun battles the following summer that so tried Freeland’s patience also happened during Protestant marches. Imagine that every summer U.S. Army veterans from the Northern states paraded through the streets of Atlanta and Richmond to commemorate their long-ago victory in the American Civil War. In the dark years of Northern Ireland, when Catholic and Protestant were at each other’s throats, that’s what marching season felt like.
    When the residents of the Lower Falls looked up that afternoon and saw the British Army descend on their neighborhood, they were then as desperate as anyone to see law and order