Remembering the Irish

So lately I've seen a few people link articles discussing the way that Irish immigrants were treated in the early days of colonization and our history as a nation. My family exists in a way that oddly straddles that line... my Dad is descended both from wealthy protestant Irish who founded several quite profitable ventures (I hear the McCurdy Department Store is still going, they are distant family) and potato Irish who were Catholics. It's a tradition I'm very proud of.

So I want you to take my full meaning when I say I do not wish to belittle the harshness those immigrants faced, true blue institutional racism placed up against them, difficult barriers that had to be overcome, used and abused and discarded by countless regimes until they clawed their way into the power structure and were able to enact change. It's part of my story, I know it, and I know that while it resembled, in some ways, the plight of the African American slave, it was not the same experience. I've never seen the mileage in rating suffering, but bad as my ancestors suffered, the African slaves suffered worse on average.

But that doesn't matter.

Even if the Irish suffered the way the Africans did, even if they had it worse, it would not excuse the way that story is being used now, or the implications that because we "got over it," so should they.

One of the refrains of the Old Testament is the near constant reminder of the Jewish people that they had been slaves and immigrants, once. There had been a time when they were without a home, a time when they had been without safety, when their very existence depended on the whims of another.

"A wanderin Aramean was my father," they are called on to announce at Passover, a declaration that all they have is a gift, a vast improvement over what was and a call to remember to be kind to the wanderers and sufferers of today. Slavery, according to Biblical law, was meant to be a temporary state, to keep someone a slave for life was an insult to the traditions, slave owners always called upon to remember the time when THEY were slaves.

So if the Bible means anything to you, if you claim to follow its word, you'll know that the recollection of Irish oppression and subsequent oppression dick wagging contest to be an exercise in futility, a betrayal of the very concepts you claim to adhere to.

Because if your ancestors did suffer in the way you claim, that should not be a call for others to "get over it," but rather a call to sympathy. In time, the Irish fought their way into the power structure, became the power brokers, fought and earned the respect we now take for granted. Instead, when you look and see others fighting for their right to exist and be respected in this nation, we should remember the time when we were the outcasts... and ally ourselves with them.

Because we knew what it was like to be treated as less than human, we would never DARE to do the same to anyone else.