Although I was born in the US, and my parents and grandparents, the community in which I was raised maintained a ferocious hold on ethnic identity. This goes for the Italians and the Poles, as well, but it's odder for the Irish because most of our families came over in the 1840s and '50s, whereas the Poles and the Italians were later arrivals than that and still had their languages. The language in the ethnic Irish neighborhoods has lost its brough long since, but the cadence and the constructions of the older speech remain. The storytelling goes on, and the songs are passed down, and I was taught folkdances at the age of 6. One day not too long ago, while talking about the children, their father remarked, "I know you've raised them in a different culture." It rather surprised me to hear it, but I suppose it's true, in its way.

Another thing that got passed down was the Great Hatred, in all its vivid black and blue. I can't have been the only child in the only community in all the United States that experienced this.

By the time I got to high school, the Troubles were bubbling up. At first I was outraged on behalf of my co-religionists and my distant cousins, that they should be oppressed in the North as they were. But later, as children began to be killed on both sides, I wondered how it could be that anyone could rejoice in that or think it just, or even think it accomplished anything apart from giving the undertakers something to do.

It has been my fervent hope since then that somebody would come to their senses. From what I have read, and adding what you have told me, there seems to have been an outbreak of sanity. And it only took 400 years! Do you suppose we could infect some blankets with it and distribute them among the natives in the Middle East?