Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Like Esau, the Irish traded their birthright for a mess of pottage. Their ancestors fought and suffered to hand them something priceless, and they chose to throw it away in exchange for garbage.
Unlike the Irish, Israeli Jews are not ashamed of their faith. And the constant threat of annihilation keeps Israelis more serious-minded, uninterested in the absurdities of woke ideology. Israel is a living reproach to decadent, shallow Ireland.
It seems that both places tried to revive parts of their ancient heritage, with middling success.
The Israelis succeeded in their language. The Irish seem to be succeeding in their pre-Christian beliefs.
St. Patrick would be again opposed and in peril if he were to arrive on the shores of the Emerald Isle. Who would have ever thought?
There are people who admire accomplishment and competence and there are people who admire the pose of victim and admire adolescent obstreperousness. The chattering classes in the occidental world are dominated by the latter (and have more influence at all levels in Canada and western Europe than they do in the United States). Also, there’s a large Jewish contingent in the American chatterati, and that puts some impediments in the way of public Jew-hatred.
The situations are not quite so parallel. The Irish started (1922) with about 25% of their population, mostly uneducated and ill-educated peasantry in the west and south, using Gaelic. The professional, political and commercial classes had used English for a couple of centuries. The Jews (whose experiences left them excellent linguists) had a much larger core of educated speakers of Hebrew. To develop a modern scientific, medical, commercial and political vocabulary in a language that never developed it on its own is almost an impossible task. It can become just as easy to use the “foreign” language for those purposes. I’ve met people educated in Ireland who detailed all the Gaelic they learned at school, none of which they use in adult life.
The Jews returning to Israel from all over everywhere needed a lingua Franca, and a revived and modernized Hebrew served the purpose nicely. Educated Ireland already had one: English, which educated Ireland had been eloquently speaking for centuries. The attempt to revive Gaelic was waste of time virtue signaling, ever near and dear to the hearts of the cranks and crazies who ever made up too high a percentage of the Irish nationalist movement.
I agree with your analysis of Gaelic and Hebrew.
I was emphasizing that Ireland would be in the same dire straits if they were implementing woke in Esperanto!
“English” dominated the world long before it went insane (woke).
The reason the Jewish race has survived through centuries of tribulation and persecution is because they know how to read and write. As a people, they value education. But more importantly, they place value on a persons ability to think for themselves. It is believed Our Lady, a young Jewish girl of simple means, knew how to read and write.
The more people we hire at work lately, the more I’ve come to realise how lazy minded people are. Yes, they can be doers, but boy do people today lack the ability to put 2 and 2 together and connect the dots.