One of the main points of celebration is something called "The Luck of the Irish." Now, for those of you unfamiliar with America and Ireland, you may take this "luck" as a whimsical little quirk of a shitshow of a holiday. But, if there's any group of people plagued with bad luck, it's the Irish.
Let's jump in our funky time machine to Ireland in the year 1850.
"Erik, I could go for some French fries," you say, gently rubbing your empty stomach as we walk out of our time machine.
"Yeah, French fries would be really good," I say. "The Irish are renowned for their potato farming." We are now walking down the street of a small village north of Dublin.
"Hey, have you noticed how approximately one in four of the people around us are dying a horribly painful and bitter death by starvation?" you inquisitively inquire.
"Oh shit, you're right. Maybe we'll have to take a pass on those potatoes, or any other food for that matter. For at least two more years," I say.
So yeah, for seven years from 1845 to 1852 the Irish population declined 20-25%. Lucky them. With this horrible famine, nearly 1,000,000 people emigrated from the godforsaken island, finding new homes in various parts of the world. One of these hot-spots was the United States. It seemed their luck had finally changed.
Americans have a rich history of brutal hatred of immigrants. And their hatred of the Irish was some of the most brutal of all. While the stereotypical images of blacks in America are widely known, the strikingly similar depictions of the Irish are a little more obscure. Many of these images show the Irish as primitive sub-humans who love violence and alcohol (only half true.) My only (corned) beef with the image to the right (Entitled "The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things"), Thomas Nast, is that the Irish are clearly whiskey drinkers, not rum drinkers. Either way, that picture just screams lucky to me. Damn lucky.
With that, there's the overall notion of luck, of good fortune. One of my pet peeves is when people throw around the word like it's nothing. For example, maybe the best/worst example, is when someone says, "You're lucky to be alive." Yeah man, you're in a full body cast, covered in your own, and possibly someone else's feces, with gouged eyes and a really, really bad haircut, but sure, you're luckier than the alternative, which would be death. Can't we come up with something better to say in this situation? How about, "Aw shit, that sucks, but at least you're not dead, and you may remain not dead for at least a few more minutes."
You know who's lucky? Me. The guy not bedridden covered in wildcat saliva. The guy who's not even at the hospital. The guy sitting around, watching Grounded For Life in bed eating a Charleston Chew. That's me. The lucky guy.
-E.
PS. I was knocking on wood the whole time writing this (not a euphemism for masturbation.)
