Writers create whole worlds; we see this most often in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Eamon Loingsigh is a Brooklyn writer whose world is fully grounded in urban reality — the rough waterfront docks of Auld Irishtown in Brooklyn, 100 years ago. His first novel Light of the Diddicoy introduced a teenage striver, Liam Garrity, who arrives from Ireland and quickly comes to understand how high the stakes for survival are in New York City. The second book in this trilogy, Exile on Bridge Street, came out in October. The boundaries of Eamon Loingsigh's own difficult literary exile can be mapped via the eclectic, inquisitive articles he has contributed to Literary Kicks over the past few years, including Revolt on Mount Parnassus: An Allegory in Copy/Paste, Lautreamont: The Other, The Salinger Mystique and Taylor Mead: A Bowery Glimpse.

Marc: When Light of the Diddicoy came out in 2014 you told us about your mission to represent the unknown history of Irish-Americans in Brooklyn, and in New York City. But your trilogy is not only about a chronicle of a people but also the story of one lonesome immigrant, struggling to survive in a frightening land. I think William Garrity is a great character, a teenager getting by (just barely) by the power of his courage and wit, and a tormented soul who is forced to make terrible choices without looking back. Is the hero of your book meant to symbolize the Irish-American experience, or does he symbolize something more personal to you?

Eamon: Liam Garrity is fourteen when he travels from a farm in Ireland to New York City, so obviously Liam represents innocence in the summation alone. When you introduce a reader to a new world, such as Brooklyn during the 1910s, it is helpful that the narrator was also experiencing it for the first time. Millions of Irish landed in New York City with no money, but gobs of hope and limitless will. Liam embodies these traits, but they are not just Irish traits, they are human, and the same can be said of our Italian, Jewish, Asian and German ancestors as well as today’s Latino or Arabic immigrants. Hoping for success in a new world so that he can his help his family, like so many immigrants have experienced in this city, is a sweeping, multi-generational theme.

I saw the Trump victory coming. I hoped with all my heart it wouldn't happen, but I've known since the day he was nominated that my beloved country had fallen prey to a sickness that would not be easily cured.

I spent election night in New York City, hoping to celebrate a Hillary Clinton win but dreading the uncertainty, and I wandered Times Square as the shock of Trump's likely victory set in. Trump is not popular in New York City, and before last night I'd never seen Times Square so filled with people and yet so desolate, so quiet, so sad.

A little after 1 am, I saw a small group of people sitting down on the long sidewalks and closed roads around 43rd Street and Broadway, as if holding a vigil or starting a new Occupy movement. Some were talking loudly, mouthing off, looking for arguments — others murmuring quietly to their friends. It made me feel good to sit there with them a few minutes, and to imagine that this was the beginning of a new sit-in, a new nonviolent protest movement. Maybe it called me back to the joyful hopes I felt five years earlier during the early weeks of the Occupy movement, which seems so far away now, though the experiences we shared in that protest uprising will surely inform us in the next protest uprising that must now begin.

A couple of days earlier, I had written an article for Pacifism21 titled "If Trump Wins, Our Fight Begins". Dear friends, dear Litkicks readers, dear good people everywhere in the world ... I don't know how we will fight back now that we have made the dumb mistake of empowering a fascist authoritarian to have control over our own lives.

I look to the greatest pacifists for inspiration when answers are hard to find, and that’s why I recently pondered what Martin Luther King would say to Donald Trump if he could witness the absurd spectacle of the 2016 Republican candidate for President. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that MLK would have counseled us to take the high road against the loudmouth boor.

But this tells us what Martin Luther King would have said to us, not what he would have said directly to Donald Trump, and likewise we can guess that the great Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy would have had more to say about Donald Trump than to Donald Trump. This connects to one of the major themes of Tolstoy’s life’s work, as reflected in the epilogue that closes his masterpiece War and Peace. In these stirring but often misunderstood pages, Tolstoy savaged the idea that we can study politics or history by focusing our attention on individual people, no matter how much “power” these people seem to have amassed.

That kind of power is an illusion, Tolstoy said. Leaders don’t move the masses; the masses move their leaders. Tolstoy thundered at the end of War and Peace about the way intelligent citizens of a progressive society often allow themselves to be dazzled into stupidity by obsessing over the personality quirks or private motivations of individual politicians, generals or public figures. Political analysis that resembles celebrity journalism completely misses the big trends and grand motivations that move nations and masses. Our failure to grasp the actual engine of political action renders us ineffectual and clueless in the face of dramatic societal trends, even as these trends affect or dominate our lives.

But celebrity-based politics is popular — and not only among our dumber fellow citizens. It often occupies our loftier intellects, our most educated minds, our cleverest pundits. But we’re wasting our time when we approach mass psychology with a gaze attuned to individual psychology. We’re gazing at fractured miniature reflections in a room of broken mirrors, seeing fragments that fail to produce a whole. How many articles have you read about the personality of Donald Trump? Or, for that matter, about the personality of Hillary Clinton? But we the American people are suffering for mistakes that have nothing to do with the personality of either public figure. We’re so dazzled and distracted by the endless pointless clues found in the realm of individual psychology that we fail to see the evidence of group psychology that actually dominates our everyday world, and drives the decisions we live by.

To begin to understand the structure of society and the engine of history, Tolstoy said, we must broaden our focus beyond the minds of individual political and military leaders. We need to direct this attention to a more mysterious force: our group mind, our herd mind, our collective self.