The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder for September 01, 2010

Sit down kid and I’ll tell you about the Irish. Oh, you don’t want to hear about others that experience genocide, were enslaved, sent here in chains and treated like dogs. OK

I had a similar experience this weekend. I commented that I put my 20 in the Armed Forces and some MILF asked me if I had been in Nam. I am almost 44 and she’s 40.

well, that certainly went in a different direction than expected

Lew–being of Irish descent myself (if they haven’t changed the law, I still qualify for the “citizenship by descent”), I’m well aware of how the Irish were mistreated through the centuries: occupied, turned into tenants on their own land, starved out (fun historic fact: at the peak of the potato famine, Ireland produced enough other crops to feed itself, but the British overlords insisted that stuff be exported for profit, and left the Irish to starve), driven to emigrate to the US, where they were treated as sub-human and given the most dangerous jobs (there’s a reason firemen and cops are associated with the Irish–the life expectancy in those jobs back in the 19th century was pretty short)…

Still, I think there’s something different about the experience of Africans who were rounded up as property, shipped as cargo and bred as domestic animals for several centuries, and that something–which I admit I can’t quite define–is what’s prevented the successful assimilation that happened to the Irish, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slavs, Greeks, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc., and is now happening to the Hispanics. I think that if we are ever going to solve the “race problem” in this country, we’re going to have to figure out just what that “different thing” is, and come to grips with it.

uh, 1066 , the battle of Hastings, right? anyway, as was once the rage to say, puddlegum,

right on

Hooah Puddleglum! I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but i have an idea of what that difference is in the South.

Riley may not make it though

I think it’s healthy for people to be interested in their own heritage. And I think it’s pretty normal for an eight-year-old to be glad that he had a chance to get born. If he ends up learning some historical chronology, good - but he will still be part of a nation that generally has a far more confused grasp of history and geography than people in most nations do. Let’s just be glad Granddad is making the effort.

Good ‘un boy! Don’t give Grandad no slack!