Oh, my, oh, my bears and lions and…thank God, rights.

January 7th, 2011 |

This is great history. I often quote the plight of the Irish when I hear or read of blacks bemoaning their past in America. I’m not particularly sympathetic as they were enslaved and sold mostly by blacks to white traders, then brought in, yes, horrible conditions, against their will. However, it was whites who freed them, whites, for the most part, who gave them equal opportunity. As much as I bemoan the condition of our borders and the fact the Mexicans are flooding us, most of them come here to work, and are self-reliant. My bitch is about the ones who don’t, and open borders don’t give us the opportunity to determine who comes and who doesn’t.

Many of us, myself included, use our tough backgrounds as a badge of honor, and I’m not hesitant to brag about the fact that I was raised in county housing, that I had a single mom who worked hard, that I was a “latch-key” kid, that my brother and I had to put ourselves through school, that no one left us a dime, etc., etc. But I use it, as I said, as a badge of honor, not a complaint about my condition nor as something to blame on someone else. I do blame our forefathers and particularly those who drafted the bill of rights and the Constitution for the fact I was blessed to be able to change my circumstance. That blame is the most shining of the badges of honor I wear.

The Irish were utilized in the south, particularly in Louisiana, to work the swamps, for $1.00 a day, when it was thought to risky to send a $3,000 slave to do the work. And the Irish, as did the blacks, faced signs in the old west that said “Irish need not apply.” Maybe the fact so many blacks have done so well in this country is because self-reliance was forced upon them, as it was on Irish and as you’ll read below, upon children. What would breed self-reliance in a person more than being cast away from family and country to a new land, where love was not necessarily part of the equation where you lived and were raised? It’s a new time.

Today, thank the good Lord and the founding fathers, there are more Irish in America than it Ireland, and I would speculate their standard of living is much higher here, although I’ve visited Ireland and wonder now why one would want to leave, and there are certainly more successful blacks in America than in those African countries from which they came. It’s a new time, and a better one for many.

Let’s pray we keep it that way, and continue to strive to make it better and better. God Bless America.

This from delanceyplace.com:

In today’s encore excerpt – the very early British colonizers of America in the 1600s and 1700s needed laborers for their new colonies, and so turned in many cases to convicts, children and other forced migrants:

“[Early British colonizers] needed a compliant, subservient, preferably free labour force, and since the indigenous peoples of America were difficult to enslave they turned to their own homeland to provide. They imported Britons deemed to be ‘surplus’ people – the rootless, the unemployed, the criminal and the dissident – and held them in the Americas in various forms of bondage for anything from three years to life. … In the early decades, half of them died in bondage.

“Among the first to be sent were children. Some were dispatched by impoverished parents seeking a better life for them. But others were forcibly deported. In 1618, the authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums, and ignoring protests from the children and their families, shipped them to Virginia. … It was presented as an act of charity: the ‘starving children’ were to be given a new start as apprentices in America. In fact, they were sold to planters to work in the fields, and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades. Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers. In 1661, the wife of a man who imported four ‘Irish boys’ into Maryland as servants wondered why her husband had not brought ‘some cradles to have rocked them in’ as they were ‘so little.’

“A second group of forced migrants from the mother country were those such as vagrants and petty criminals whom England’s rulers wished to be rid of. The legal ground was prepared for their relocation by a highwayman turned Lord Chief Justice who argued for England’s jails to be emptied in America. Thanks to men like him, 50,000 to 70,000 convicts (or maybe more) were transported to Virginia, Maryland, Barbados, and England’s other American possessions before 1776. …

“A third group were the Irish. … Under Oliver Cromwell’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies. And it did not end with Cromwell; for at least another hundred years, forced transportation continued as a fact of life in Ireland. …

“The other unwilling participants in the colonial labour force were the kidnapped. Astounding numbers are reported to have been snatched from the streets and countryside by gangs of kidnappers or ‘spirits’ working to satisfy the colonial hunger for labour. Based at every sizeable port in the British Isles, spirits conned or coerced the unwary onto ships bound for America. … According to a contemporary who campaigned against the black slave trade, kidnappers were snatching an average of around 10,000 whites a year – doubtless an exaggeration, but one that indicates a problem serious enough to create its own grip on the popular mind.’ ”

Author: Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

Title: White Cargo

Publisher: New York University Press

Pages: 12-14

FROM THE PEA PATCH

Oh, my, oh, my bears and lions and…thank God, rights.

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