Celebrating Unattractive Choices

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

History is often the same movie with a different cast. Watching and reading news reports over the weekend that President Trump may not be cracking down on immigrant communities as hard as some of his supporters would like  (yeah, I had to read the headline twice myself) is a variation on a theme that has been the American tune from before the beginning of our nation. I am a verse of that song.

The Irish's arrival in America was, for its time, the largest and most prolonged migration of one ethnic group since the nations of the world began keeping track of such things. Those fleeing Ireland for America were not only family members, but extended families, whole neighborhoods, and, in many instances, entire villages and townships. All were half a step ahead of starvation and destitution.

To remain in Ireland was to die, but fleeing to America was often death of another kind, only more slowly. Having already been made into outcasts in our own country, immigrants hardly noticed how our treatment in the New World often resembled our handling in the old.

And still, we came, by the thousands every month, by the tens of thousands, and into the millions. At one point, very nearly twenty percent of all Americans were of Irish ancestry, which is a statistic offered today, Saint Patrick's Day, to help not just those of us who are and were part of the Irish Diaspora to remember where we came from but to remind all of us how far we have yet to go.

-bill kenny

I Saw the Mistake that I Had Made

I wrote this five years in honor of this day. I've had no reason to rethink so much as a single word of it since. Making it (no pressure) your turn.

This is a day that, as full of Irish heritage as I am (along with so much else (maybe more?)), I get more than a little creeped out by the celebrations of all that is emerald even when it's not. There's a claim that there are more persons of Irish descent living in New York City than there are in Dublin, but I suspect that's a statement you can make without (nearly) fear of contradiction about almost every ethnicity who've come to settle here in The Land of the Round Doorknobs.

Whether your tastes run from Danny Kaye singing Danny Boy to U2 through The Chieftains or Horslips and how you wash down your bubble and squeak, if you're celebrating being Irish or pretending to be Irish, or you just like to bathe with Irish Spring, hope the day is a good one.  

When The Gangs of New York was making the rounds, I watched it like a deer in the headlights growing more disquieted and discomfited with each frame. Though I was already old enough to realize history is written by the winners and should have been old enough to know better, I learned of a past of which I had only a passing knowledge and felt either comfort nor joy in knowing. 

For cinema, the movie had more than an inconvenient truth or two about alternatives to the 'melting pot' (myth) explanation every child received as part of her/his American history classes in grade schools across this country for most if not all of our growing up years. (And I'm not just talking about Leo's accent.) 

Instead, what more of us learned as we aged was that we have as many dirty little secrets as we have truths we hold to be self-evident (and sometimes the former is also the latter but, in that case, is more often than not always unacknowledged). The stories of the 1863 draft riots in New York City during the Civil War were as well-known in their time as the number of leaves on a shamrock and the animus and enmity directed at 'the others' (of all stripes) is true to this day, over a century and a half later. 

As it happens, for those from the Sod who drown their troubles a wee bit too often, maybe there's a deeper reason why you order the beverages you do when we dine out together; we just didn't know it. And whether you're marching down that New York City Fifth Avenue today or in any of the hundreds of slightly out of control celebrations across the nation that we tend to use to get us closer to spring, please spare a thought for the Battalion de San Patricio five thousand miles from a home to which they could never return who became a Legion of Strangers to those who would have been their countrymen, but refused.
-bill kenny