what exactly should my 'irishness' mean to me as an american anyway

[oldbadger]

Dribble...I feel zero guilt for anything that happened before breakfast this morning. You have the liberty to boo-hoo over any perceived wrong you wish, but don't have the right to decide the conscience of others.

So long as you remember your own words, then 'no problem'.

 

[oldbadger]

Well, to be honest that's quite hard for me, since the thing is pretty murky. My paternal great grandfather is said to have died young, and we don't know much of anything about him.. My grandpa however , always apparently had a very strong sense of being Irish .. Everyone knew him to be an 'irishman'.. but I never really got to know him since he died when I was a kid.. trying to find my great grandpa's correct death record is pretty hard for several other complicated reasons which I won't bore you with.. Complicating this irishness thing further is actually the fact that my surname could apparently come from scotland and england as well ... the only thing I really have to go on is my grandpa's insistence on his roots.. Unless I want actually do some serious traveling and research, maybe I can't really know for sure about that... it's kinda frustrating to think about, because it might be impossible to know at this point exactly what's going on with all this

And maybe that feeds into why I asked this thread question .. because I suspect that some americans like myself may experience these sorts disconnections that rapidly accrue with each generation, and it does get to this point of wondering why one's whateverness really matters anymore.. I don't know

Thankyou for your post.

Your surname............. although Scotland was mostly Catholic, like Southern Ireland, any surname that matches with Ireland, Scotland and England sounds (to me) as if it could very well have been of a Protestant background. If I'm right then your folks may well have hailed from Northern Ireland.

Work on the backgrounds of your surname. Do you havde any photographs of your ancient relatives? I'll tell something that might amaze you, but the Irish can (often) tell Northern and Southern, Catholic and Protestant, on sight! GTrue enough, and a tough old Northern Irish (retired) RSM was once talking about the 'troubles' when he said (in hateful tones) 'Ah yes! We can tell 'em! We know who they are!'
This sounded like rubbish to me so I challenged him. We were sitting in a restaurant full of course trainees in Belfast (we were all together).
'OK', I said ,'So tell me now. Who in this restuarant is a Catholic?'
This man glanced around the whole group and soon gained eye contact with another delegate from the same course as ours. 'Catholic?' he called out. The man nodded, got up and came to our table. The ex RSM explained my challenge and the Catholic smiled, nodded, and said 'And we can tell you lot an' all!'
The RSM then explained to me that Catholics' eyes are spaced slightly closer tiogether than Protestants (true!) and the Catholic, I remember his name now was Dominic, a Catholic name, he told me that he clicked on Protestants mostly from their hair type and colouring.

Check your photographs! Research your surname. You'll be amazed at what you can discover from almost nothing. .

 

[BSM1]

So long as you remember your own words, then 'no problem'.

Wouldn't have said it if I didn't live it....

 

[Brickjectivity]

So you may not be aware of it , but we 'irish - americans' often seem obsessed with our 'irishness.' St. paddy's day and halo-ween , america is fastidious with these for example. People like to mention that they are 'irish' in conversations.

So I think a problem is, that although we spread far and wide around this rock, my experience in internet conversations with the real Irish is that they don't really like us , or recognize us. Frankly, depending on how the ancestry thing is brought up, I have gotten some vicious comments

So I guess we are people who unfortunately may not like each other

My hunch is that the real Irish don't like the american sort of association to alcohol , and sort of want to divorce themselves from that, so that's one thing

Maybe they have a way of looking at all this that consistent with they mythology , where peoples who move about seem required to constantly 'morph' into new things

Finally , I kind of wonder about Jim Morrison's sort of comparison of the Irish people to the Jewish people , where they seem to occupy a parallel quadrant of hardy survivors, though with the unfortunate caveat of being self - destructive, according to him. If that conception is commonly held by americans , one can see why the Irish would want to divorce themselves from it

You are the descendant of a previously persecuted minority. It makes you a symbol. The country was wrong about your ancestors. They joined the country, and we all benefited. Its not like you can take credit for what they have done, but it is a rallying point for you. If I want to start a club I need to come up with something for it to be about, like people who wear green jackets. You can just start a 'Club for Irish Americans' and you're there.

 

[amorphous_constellation]

Hehe those series are not showing the true viking way of life. Vikings were not as brutal as Tv and movies portray them to be, as i said 99% of the time they were fishing, farming or some was doing travel to sell things they made and to buy things they did not have.

Do you have any opinions on the Rigsthula poem? I guess it sort of describes what different classes of people were like in the culture, but in the end, the son of the noble seemed to be trained for warfare, probably from an early age. He is even described in there as having a fierce or grim aspect, even as a newborn. The poem seems to end with a crow telling him to go conquer his neighbors. If this character is at the top of the social pyramid, that's pretty horrifying. So arguably, the lower classes in the poem made up the engine to support the warlike nobles. The more I read norse mythology, the more I am actually led to believe that the pop culture stuff is sort of accurate. It's not something I want to be true, I strive to be a non-violent person, but it seems kind of hard to overlook

 

[Spirit of Light]

Do you have any opinions on the Rigsthula poem? I guess it sort of describes what different classes of people were like in the culture, but in the end, the son of the noble seemed to be trained for warfare, probably from an early age. He is even described in there as having a fierce or grim aspect, even as a newborn. The poem seems to end with a crow telling him to go conquer his neighbors. If this character is at the top of the social pyramid, that's pretty horrifying. So arguably, the lower classes in the poem made up the engine to support the warlike nobles. The more I read norse mythology, the more I am actually led to believe that the pop culture stuff is sort of accurate. It's not something I want to be true, I strive to be a non-violent person, but it seems kind of hard to overlook

I see it as a poem nothing more.