We all heard the short speech given by the Irish Prime Minister shaming Drumpf to his face. Only a few months ago we had a leader who was similarly articulate and dignified. This morning NPR ran a piece on the Famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, a riveting re-telling of history in our own time.
The link to the Irish speech includes commentary about the immigration piece, decrying the xenophophia (“fear of foreigners” to you Drumpf supporters out there who can’t read the big words). But the other lesson of the Irish Famine regards the politics of England at the time.
And so, a quick reminder of a book I reviewed.
Disclaimer: I have read this book, but have no connection (financial or otherwise) to the author or publisher. Oh, I was married to a beautiful red-haired freckle-faced Irish lass from Massachusetts…. her family came to Boston around 1840 and stayed. Her late father grew up in Somerville Massachusetts and was active in Democratic politics beginning in 1946 when he worked on JFK’s first political campaign (yes, he'd met JFK personally). This continued throughout his life, and yes, he was profoundly Catholic. A painting of John and Bobby Kennedy hung proudly in the living room. If you listen carefully to a pure Boston accent, you can still here a hint of Irish in the way they pronounce words with a “t" at the end, and that was true of my in-laws. My kids are half-Irish.
But I digress. The Book is The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly.
“John Kelly gives heartbreaking detail to the Great Famine that seared itself into the memory of the Irish people, and sheds fascinating new light on the policy decisions that made it even worse. The Graves Are Walking is a cautionary tale for all who would risk calamity--human, economic, or ecological--in the name of scoring an ideological victory.” ―President Bill Clinton
My own review of this book was in 2013, on Goodreads. The premise of the book is to depict the effects of the famine on the people of Ireland, but also to explore the political mindset of the British Parliament that made it happen. In other words, while the potato crop failed, there were plenty of other agricultural endeavors that could have sustained the populace, but since the absentee landlords needed cash, they prevented the Irish from using the resources that were available. A lot of the book details the degree to which the government rationalized the inhumanity they were inflicting on the Irish.
The parallels are obvious. In my own work, I travel to Nepal, and I started doing so when there was “food insecurity” in west-Central Nepal and Far West Nepal. In the hospitals there, we knew we often needed to address the poor nutritional status of our patients in order to heal them from whatever illness had struck. To this day, most hospitals operate a “feeding station” nearby, for the purpose of re-nourishing victims of starvation or near-starvation.
One incident from 2007, my first trip to west-Central Nepal, comes to mind: Being on the pediatric ward with my Nepali nursing students and watching a two-year-old eat rice in a high chair. Normally in USA getting a toddler to eat is a sort of strange “fun” because it becomes a game to prevent spillage and get the food into the child’s mouth. On this one particular day, cooked rice grains were scattered about the floor as usual, where the infant threw them. From a little distance away I watched the mom as she squatted on the floor, and one by one, picked up every single kernel, putting each in her own mouth. She was very thin, herself. I had to stop and think. How do you get to a point where this is necessary? How did the government and the society get to that point?
The answer: when self-serving politicians work only for the upper class and adopt an attitude of blaming the victims and looking only at their own personal bottom line. It is perverse and obscene that politicians can find a way to excuse the inexcusable, yet they will. This was true in Ireland in 1840, and in Nepal during the civil war. I fear that it is true with the so-called “Christians" of today's GOP here in USA. In their words we hears echoes of the politicians of Dickens’ time.
My mouth drops when I hear men whose last names are Ryan, Mulvaney, and Hannity rationalize the heartless and cruel actions embodied in the Trump budget. You can find the book on Amazon.