The Statue of Liberty Got To Me Last Week
This past Saturday I caught my first ride on the ferry from Sandy Point, NJ to Manhattan. Passing under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge that joins Staten Island to Brooklyn, I experienced a different aspect of NYC. It felt like discovering a new city.
I stood at the bow exulting in new architectural and engineering triumphs when my wife tapped my shoulder and said, “look there,” pointing in the distance to the Statue of Liberty. I saw her from the proper angle, the way millions of European immigrants saw her after a month in steerage on the open sea.
I got chills. She is magnificent, our Colossus of Rhodes (and the same height), but with so much more to offer than a tribute to a sun god.
I wondered how my Irish grandparents felt when they saw her in 1903 and 1905, arriving dirt poor, forced to leave their native land where they were second-class citizens — economically exploited, disenfranchised, unprotected by the legal system, and despised as uneducated peasants. America was their refuge.
They had the considerable advantage of English-speaking white folks coming to America fifty years after the huge wave of Irish fleeing the Great Famine. The Irish had political power in New York and Boston (where JFK’s grandfather was mayor), and thereby control of civil service jobs. My grandfather came to Boston and got work driving spikes for the Boston and Maine railroad and made extra money as a wrestler. Later he would drive subway trains on the red line. My grandmother had made it to eighth grade and was good at math, so she got work as a bookkeeper.
They were grateful Americans who had experienced and understood settler colonialism, though they didn’t have that vocabulary. They educated their children about the long history of oppression and the long fight for a free Ireland. They became FDR Democrats and believed everyone deserved a fair chance, or several.
I never met either. They worked hard and died young. But I feel them. On Saturday I felt them especially close.
American history is filled with the horrors of genocide, slavery and enduring racism, imperialism, warmongering, and the lies, lies, lies that tried to justify all of it.
But there’s the other side of the story, one that I try not to forget. That is a history of brave, decent, and hardworking people who loved their families, friends, communities, and even their country. This is their country, our country. And we can never allow fascists, malignant narcissists, and simple-minded theocrats to take away our basic rights:
to control our bodies, to live in a climate that supports life, our right to vote and have our votes count, freedom of speech and press, our right to an impartial, non-racist justice system, freedom from fear of our own government, freedom from fear of madmen with easy access to assault weapons, freedom from unnecessary hunger and poverty.
I honor my Irish grandparents and the Nova Scotia ones too, and the ancestors going further back who wanted a better future for their children and their children’s children. We made it, ancestors. My brother and I and our children and grandchildren live a richer and easier life than you could have ever imagined. Thank you for all you did to survive the Great Hunger and the other threats to your survival. Thank you for passing life on.
I’ll try my best not to let you down.
