Royal Wedding: Part 4.

A brief thing. I wrote a second article for The Northwest Indiana times covering the excitement for the wedding right up to the procession. It's not available online, so I'm putting up what I wrote here.

Kass Stone
Times Correspondent
London – The celebration of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding has been building for weeks.
On Wednesday afternoon, the children of Plumstead Manor Nursery (located on London’s South East side) celebrated the royal nuptials with a wedding party in William and Kate’s honor. The little girls came dressed in their best princess dresses and the boys came bedecked in their finest suits. They made royalty themed arts and crafts, ate wedding cake, danced and waved their Union Jacks proudly in honor of the prince and new princess.
Plumstead Manor Nursery treasurer Jean Reader is a lifelong fan of the monarchy. In her late 70s, Reader was one of the hundreds of thousands of people that cheered Queen Elizabeth’s coronation procession in 1953. For her, the wedding and community events like the nursery party are important for British society.
“If you look around, there are a lot of different nationalities living here and this helps make it all gel,” said Reader. “After all, we do have a monarchy and we should celebrate it. We are here to wave the flag.”
Crown Point natives Chris and Lisa Westworth had planned to be amongst the throng of people cheering on the royal wedding procession. Their plans had to change when Lisa gave birth to their son, Cayden, several weeks early. They are now content to watch the ceremony from the comfort of their home in the West London neighborhood of Chiswick.
“I just like the fact that we live in London while everyone is so obsessed about this wedding and that one day we can tell our son that we lived here when King William and Queen Kate were married. It is kind of exciting,” said Lisa Westworth.
Amongst the carnival atmosphere of vendors and celebrants in Trafalgar Square early Friday morning, just outside the route the wedding procession will take from Buckingham Palace along The Mall to Westminster Abbey, were Canadians Amy Beckham and Brenda Hooton. The two traveled from their home in Niagra Falls, Ontario to celebrate the wedding in London.
“We’re here because I think there is so much bad news in the world and this is an opportunity to be happy and just have a good time,” said Beckham. “Besides, we share the royal family. She’s our queen too. She’s on our money too.”
On The Mall, seeking a place to witness the procession, were Mark Abella and Mandy Yoxall of Sydney, Australia.
“It’s our heritage. They’re our royal family too. It’s a once in a life time opportunity for us. We’re not going to get to experience this again, seeing a king married,” said Yoxall. “I mean, Prince Harry will probably get married, but he’s not going to be king.”

Getting Started!

I've started this blog to see if I couldn't do something different from the typical travel blogs by my fellow US ex-pats that are out there. Thought I'd kick things off with some photos I took of a protest in front of the Ministry of Defense in Westminster the afternoon of March 21, 2011. The demonstrators were protesting the NATO bombings of Libya. While I agree with the broad sentiment, I have a problem with the way the message was being delivered by the speakers on hand. There were two groups speaking at the same time. One was a more "Western" group and the other was a fundamentalist, Islamic group. The fundamentalist had an imam speaking, who kept repeating that David Cameron was out to kill all muslims. This of course ignores that the NATO bombing is in support of muslims fighting against another group of muslims. Not very effective. The more "Western"/secular group argued that the bombing was killing innocents and was a heavy handed response and that it was not the "West's" place to intervene. This is a slightly better argument, but it ignores the fact that the Libyan rebels happily accepted NATO intervention. In fact, they have complained about it not being enough! So the point was that Qadaffi is vile and should go but nobody should help get rid of him? Not a great point and one that does not easily translate in a noisy demonstration on a busy London street.

There were also currents of anti-colonialism sentiments. This is more on the mark but the extremist rhetoric without a rational argument backing it up just causes the message to be easily ignored as "crazy talk".

(Case in Point)

This protestor is typical of the message the fundamentalist were trying to deliver. It is a wronge, emotional, knee jerk reaction to the events in Libya. NATO's intervention is about securing Libyan oil for the West and keeping it out of the hands of a maniac like Qaddafyi, a fundamentalist Islamic government or a government that actually has the best interest of the Libyan people at the front of its agenda.

It's easy math. The Allies support the rebels. The rebels defeat Qaddafyi. The rebels are indebted to The Allies. To pay back this debt and guarantee that their new government continues to have NATO's military backing, they cut The Allies sweet, sweet oil deals. It's a form of economic colonialism. Very simple. It has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with economics.

So, it was an interesting event, but ultimately the protestors failed with their messages, which were convoluted and too full of anti-Western venom to make a positive impact on the good people of London, especially the good people working in the Ministry of Defense and the nearby Parliament.