The issue of class in the US revolves around money. You can put a silver spoon in GWB's mouth and his dad's - but that would also apply now to my kids and eventually my grandchildren. Whats wrong with leaving money to the kids and giving them a step up?
Not a thing in the world, so far as I know. But we should be clear, in Bush's case, he got into Yale as a legacy and he got into Harvard because he was his dad's son. Not merit. It's a little bit of fluff to argue otherwise. And more than a little hypocritical when you read the merit versus race language in the admin's Supreme Court brief.
The history of the Irish - if you want to follow it - is as bad as anything Africans have been through. Genocide, colonization (heard of Ulster), forced starvation, forced emmigration, slavery, indentured slavery going back several hundred years before the first Englishman bought a slave in Africa (from an Arab or African) to bring to his plantation in America.
Well, I wouldn't agree that it's as bad as black history. But I agree it's very bad. I've read some of it. The famines of the 1840s, the ships coming over filled with diseased. As I recall one ship was kept out of either the Boston or New York harbor until some deadly disease had killed off almost all aboard. And then the signs in Boston shops saying Irish should stay away. And, of course, one can go back to Cromwell. I've read a bit there as well.
And I have even a bit worse to say. My family background on both sides is Scots-Irish. For the longest I thought I was a product of mix of Scots and Irish. Not so. The Scots were brought over to settle northern Ireland and drove the Irish population out. The queens colonists. Not a happy heritage.
As for my admiration for JFK, I'm one of the ones, as is my wife, who can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was saying when I first heard about the killing. And since it was in my home state, it hit me even harder. The killings of JFK and Bobby and Martin Luther King hit me about as hard as any deaths in my family have. |
