Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

While everyone is out celebrating and believing that being passed out drunk before mid-afternoon makes them Irish (it doesn't, that's condescending and no one appreciates it) please take time to read this wonderful article from The Zinn Education Project about Ireland's real history during the potato famine. The famine is one of the driving forces behind mass Irish immigration to the United State's in the 1840's (my own family included) and it still haunts Ireland to this day.

Just remember while you're all out having fun today, that 200 years ago, my family was met by signs like this hanging in businesses all over America.

Okay, just promise you'll bastardize us in 200 years!

Slainte!

3 comments:

  1. You're the life of the party, Meg! Looking forward to your downer piece on Christmas.

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  2. In the big melting pot of America it has been nothing but bigger and stronger groups of people who seek to overpower the weak. Whether we are talking about ethnic background, or most applicable to today's "Walker World" of politics, business (big and even small) and religious groups seeking to control the weaker workers and perceived heathens.

    Meg hits it for me here. The supposed "free market" people continue to work to segregate their little fiefdoms for us out here in rural Wisconsin. It's truly funny how little small town business elites who inherited their wealth continue to keep it, and even keep their workers as ethnically similar to themselves, all the while each group works to suppress any private business venture by a minority group, ethnic, religious, or just simply lower class, out here in the sticks of Wisconsin.

    I can only imagine these little class maintaining Republicans do the exact same thing, all legally, since they own the local governments essentially, do the same thing across Wisconsin. Day in, day out.

    St. Patricks day represents something far different for me than a mere drinking holiday, for sure.

    “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.”

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