Growing up, I used to hear my Irish Catholic grandmother remind me that there are lessons to be learned from the lives of the saints. Such lessons can be applied not only to individuals, but also to nations.
Of all of the great nations of the world, America stands out as the quintessential "nation of immigrants," composed of voyagers and exiles from every one of the worlds tongues, nations, and stations; from every religion or none at all, from every zone of conflict or street of violence, from the vastnesses of continents scorched by equinoctial suns to the fringes of green and seagirt islands such as Ireland, granite-buttressed and battered by the ageless pounding of Atlantic breakers.
In a sense, every American is without exception a member of some minority group or other. To be sure, our American story has until recent years been largely identified as the history of the white settlers, primarily British and northern European, who came to what is now Virginia and the northeast. Yet in truth, our history is the history of a lengthy series of arrivals, even from that of the first peoples who arrived so many thousands of years ago across the now-drowned land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.
On Saint Patrick's day, of course, we recall the experience of the Irish in America, and rightly so, for that experience has molded the history of America and of Ireland, and has changed the lives of every Irish-American, and every Irishman.
The story of the Gael in the New World is almost a textbook example of how the contributions of a discrete and identifiable community can enlarge the American experience. We who are of Irish descent brought with us from the ancestral island a culture, a world view, a faith, and most importantly, a faculty for the written and the spoken word that has been almost without peer in the history of the English language. After all, James Joyce once asked, who but the Irish could have taken the tongue of the conqueror and made it so brilliantly their own?
Yet the one great sin against blood, faith, and heritage of which Irish-Americans can never be accused is that of being assimilated into an alien culture and entirely abandoning their own. Instead, the Irish, like so many others before and since, beginning as outsiders, integrated themselves into American society, and in so doing, influenced that society in ways both obvious and subtle. Even the Famine Irish, who fled the Potato Famine of the 1840s, and were often the poorest of the poor and the rudest of the rude, came as members of a culture that, though often dormant under English occupation, possessed and possesses still an ancient and noble heritage. And without the leavening and the gifts of the Irish and of their culture, our own American culture would be perceptibly poorer.
On the Feast of Saint Patrick, then, all of us may profit from the example of the Irish in America, not out of simple nostalgia, or even from mere pride of ancestry (if, dear reader, you happen, like yours truly, to be of Irish descent), but rather because the Irish have been our teachers, from whose achievements and history in this country we may take instruction and inspiration. For against the Irish immigrants, particularly the Famine Irish, were ranged many of the most powerful social and political forces of the day, united in fear and dislike of a proud but primitive people from a different culture, of a Roman Catholic people in a Protestant republic, of a communitarian people in a land of rugged individualists, and of poor people in a society just beginning to come to terms with the potentialities of staggering wealth. Why, the nativist element demanded, did we have to admit the Irish at all? And if we had to let them in, why couldn't the Irish just be assimilated until they adopted the faith and culture of the Protestant population? Against such an initial background, the history of the Irish community in this country was for some time a history of initial rejection, a history of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry and fear In the longer term, however, the history of the Irish in America has been a history of slow, steady surmounting of barriers, a history of building bridges, paying dues, and establishing bona fides, a history, in short, of integration.
Yet such a history is decades in the making, and true integration is the accomplishment of generations. For Irish-Americans, the struggle to secure equal rights was in many ways closely parallel to the struggles waged by other minority groups over the years. In that regard, the experience of the Irish is certainly not unique, but it is instructive.
And to the extent that we still struggle to recognize that those who may differ from us are nevertheless our fellow Americans, and just as entitled as we are to a place at the table in the commonwealth, and that we may profitably take the blueprint for the social and political integration of all Americans, of whatever creed, color, gender, orientation, or place of origin, from the Irish. For as the Irish demonstrated, participation in the life of the larger community leads to habituation; habituation leads to accommodation; accommodation leads to toleration, and toleration leads to acceptance and integration. When integration happens, barriers fall and hitherto separate cultures or subcultures can teach and learn from one another, and can enrich one another, fulfilling the American promise and making this nation stronger for it.
This, then, is the lesson for St. Patrick’s day.
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Councilmember Paul S. Marchand: Working for All of Cathedral City's People.
