MARCH 17, 2020 – As I sit in our “sitting room,” sipping coffee, distancing myself from the latest news (while my wife, on the other hand, reads it), and moving my fingers across the keyboard of my laptop, I realize that by chance I’m wearing my dark green sweatshirt—the one about which my wife often says, “You’re wearing that one again?”
Green, of course, is the color of the Irish, and the color many people, Irish and non-Irish, wear today, St. Paddy’s Day.
Anyone who knows a thing or two about Irish history knows it’s not a happy one. (For a little background by way of historical fiction, try Trinity by Leon Uris.) The Irish homeland involved more rain than sunshine and many generations of oppression and economic hardship. And then there was the awful Famine, which caused the death of one in eight people and prompted another one out of seven to emigrate. The potato blight decimated an already troubled place.
If, in turn, you’ve been to the Tenement Museum in the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, you see what came of many of the Irish who emigrated to America. For many of the migrants in green, their plight here was barely a step up from the misery they’d escaped in Ireland.
If you ask me, “the luck of the Irish,” wasn’t particularly good luck.
As it turns out, the phrase “the luck of the Irish” originated across the continent from the unhappy tenements of New York. The California Gold Rush (following the discovery at Sutter’s Mill in 1848) attracted lots of hardy Irish, and as the odds played out, lots of Irish wound up striking it rich. With a certain amount of derision, the unlucky non-Irish dubbed it “the luck of the Irish,” meaning, however good the gold might be for the Irish, it was a matter of just plain dumb luck. The Irish, it was believed, weren’t good enough for good luck.
By sheer pluck, as by luck—good or dumb—the Irish overcame their hardships, oppressions, and cataclysms to become major contributors to and beneficiaries of the Great American Experiment.
What all of us could use on this day, St. Patrick’s Day, and every day that follows, is a great big dose of “the luck of the Irish.” I don’t mean striking a vein of pure gold shining brightly across the bed of a gurgling stream in the wilds of the Golden State. I mean the fight and feistiness of the human spirit; the determination to overcome the odds and obstacles; the desire to succeed despite our bad luck and inevitably bad choices along the way.
If the parades have been canceled, if the pubs have been closed, if the live Irish music has been silenced, may all of us—all of us—don the green today and infuse ourselves with “the PLUCK of the Irish.” Henceforth, may we forge for ourselves, Irish and non-Irish, the GOOD LUCK OF THE IRISH!
HAPPY ST. PADDY’S DAY, EVERYONE!
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
1 Comment
St. Patrick’s Day was almost a holy day of obligation at our house. My mother was fiercely proud to be Irish roots and we were frequently reminded how lucky we were to be Irish. I felt so sorry for anyone who wasn’t Irish – kinda still do. 😁
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