Gaza and Ireland

I am Irish. Pretty sure. Mom and pop were. My great grandfather was in the original Irish Republican Army. He killed and English soldier and fled to America because there was a warrnat for his death. That is what brought us to America. A killing.

I have been told by people who knew that he was a lot like me. Size, look, intelligence. He was very political and a keen student of history. He also liked Pabst Blue Ribbon, I seem to recall being told. He warned that when the Chinese united with the arabs things would not go well for the world.

He died before I was born, I never got to meet him. I would have loved to have talked to him, to have heard what he learned. He came to America and went to work in the coal mines and later did something else. I don't recall what. He was loved by the family and is highly regarded.

During his time, a famine was in Ireland. It killed one fourth of all the Irish Catholics. They were starved to death intentionally. Beef that was raised in Ireland was sent to England during the famine. An article in the New York Times suggested that the famine was a good solution to the Irish Problem. You can find it online.

The famine in Ireland was so bad that the Choctaw Indians raised money and sent it to the Irish people. This was doen only 16 years after the Choctaw had faced the Trail of Tears. I hope they know that it is and was appreciated, not for the amount, for the thought. I still cry whenever I think about it. They had very little; but, hated the thought of others starving. What a contrast to the absentee landlords.

It was not legal to teach Irish catholics in our own country. It was not legal to teach our own language. It was not legal for the Irish to even own land in Ireland. There was a time, when I was younger, when I hated the English. I hated them for what they did to my people and my country. I do not feel that way anymore. I do not blame a nation or even a race, I blame the people who were in charge of England. I blame the Royal family.

The average English person had nothing to do with what occured in Ireland. Heck, read Dickens and you will see how well the average English person was treated in his own country. Pretty bleak and miserably. The average person in England was told that the Irish were the problem, they were competition and why he did not get enough. Sounds like how most Americans view Mexicans. Divide and conquer. Find a foreign bad guy.

The truth is that most people really don't want to cause problems outside of their own country. Most people just want to have some peace and quiet. You have to go out of your way to propagandize and threaten to get the average person willing to hurt others in foriegn lands. We would rather stay at home and make babies. Making babies is more much more fun than killing them.

When I was younger something called Bloody Sunday happened in Northern Ireland. In 1972 a group of demonstrators was fired upon by the English army. They were unarmed. 27 were shot, five in the back, and 14 died as a result. I still have family in Ireland. Some live on family land. I have never met them. They live in Meath and Cork. I saw a picture of our homes, our incestral homes.

In Northern Ireland, the Catholics, the ancestral Irish, are still treated poorly. They live in ghettos and still are not treated the same as the rest of the population. This is what it is. I have asked myself, over the years, if we had our country back, if the country were united, how should the laws be changed? Would we be right to throw out the protestants? My answer is no.

When the English took over Ireland, the people who arrived (mainly Scotts and English) and took our land were invaders. At that time it would be right to send them back to where they came from. Having said that, the people living there now, they are Irish. They did not take the land and did not starve my family. They are just people now, not invaders.

I live in the United States. My family came here long after it had been taken from the American Indians, from the Choctaw. My family had nothing to do with it and this is where I grew up, where I was born. It is my home now too. If we could give the United States back to the Indians, I would hope they would let me stay. I would ask them to. My daughters are part Indian, the ex was part Indian, I am not part Indian; but, I am American.

Israel provides me the same sort of questions. It had been owned by the Palistinians, it was taken over by the Isrealites, it was taken over by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persian, Greeks, Romans and the Byzantines. It was controllecd by the English. The English promised it to the Arabs and the Jews after World War II.

Who is Israeli? Heck, who was born there? We cannot change history. We cannot take back what our parents sold. I can assure you that if the Palestinians were to get back Israel, the average Palistinian would be treated no better by his own people. I can promise you that the average Jew is Israel still is treated like crap by his own people. That is true in every country.

We do not fight for anything other than the good of those who control and take advantage of us. Not Jew, not Palestinian, not English, not Choctaw, not Irish, not American. We do not profit from such things, nor do we seek to. The problems in the middle east will never be solved by more war. We have thousands of years of wars and few if any problems have ever been solved by them.

I have come a long way from my upbringing. I have come a long way from the things I used to believe. We are all capable of change. We all are. What we need to learn is that hate does not work to well, it only expands. The Choctaw taught me about caring. I thank them. I think they just might let me stay if they ever got the country back, I hope so. I appreciate what they did and like it here. It is my home.

I hope this post is of some value to someone. I hope a Choctaw reads it and knows that his families generosity continues to be appreciated. I thank them for what they did for my family, they said they cared, that we were not alone. Those are good sentiments. Nice if we all had them. Be well.