By JAMES SPANGLER, OD

A short time ago Times Observer ran a well deserved front page article on the book Rory Land by friend and Warren Area High School classmate TM Gay. It was about the ups and downs of a golfer, but also an honest look at the social mess of Catholic Ireland and Protestant England and the chunk of land in between Northern Ireland — Rory’s Land.

England’s history is checkered with swings from Protestant to Catholic, acceptance to hatred, shifting to the whims and beliefs of royal regimes.

The oppression of Catholics by Protestants was every bit as contentious and violent as racial hatred and violence in United States history.

Or does it parallel not the past, but the United States today?

Joseph McIlroy, Rory’s father’s uncle, was a self taught computer guy in the early 1970s, on the ground floor. He had prospects as bright as Gates or Jobs. But he was Irish Catholic. Taking a good job away from a deserving Protestant with an obvious solution – five or six rounds at point blank range solved that problem.

Justice? No way. A half hearted investigation found nothing.

However the story goes back much further than the violence in Northern Ireland in the second half of the 20th Century.

Ireland meant potatoes. (England’s laws had destroyed the Irish fishing industry.) Northern Ireland meant cloth.

Both were difficult, dangerous, and tedious jobs. And when famine came in the 1850s and starvation piled on the strifes of prejudice and violence, well it pretty much defined the persecution that justifies a claim of asylum.

So they came. To the U.S. in droves. No Statue of Liberty to welcome them — it was erected in the 1880s. Then again, the citizens didn’t want them either.

They were “Micks.” No, not short for Mc as in McIlroy, but Mick as in slang for Mike. Because they all had the same name. Mike.

As Catholics they couldn’t be trusted. Job opening? No Irish need apply. Railroad work? Well that was OK. Kept them out of town. And it was dangerous. Good chance they would die.

In fact canal digging in the fertile Mississippi Delta was always done by “micks.” The dykes collapsed with regularity, often with fatal results. Slaves and horses had some value. Irishmen? They were worth nothing.

Far from the only unwelcome immigrants, the Irish were joined by the Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews without papers. Whether they had them or not — they were “WOPs.”

Except they weren’t. WOP doesn’t mean without papers. It derives from the Latin word “vappa,” spoiled wine. As in a worthless wine. Which meant a worthless Italian. And Catholic to boot.

One would think such groups with this past history would have some sympathy for those in current oppression leading them to seek asylum in the U.S. today. But you would be wrong.

Just as England used propaganda against the Irish Catholics — all crooks, rapists, no papers, stealing our jobs — we hear the same today against refugees from Central and South America, and islands such as Haiti. Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Catholic. They join right in.

What is ironic is their champion is a man who actually is a convicted rapist.

Of course persecution of the alien is nothing new. It has been this way forever. It is even Biblical.

Levictus 19:34 “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Deuteronomy 27:19 “Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner…”

Zechariah 7:10 “Do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.”

Why? Because the Jews, God’s chosen people, were every bit as good at rejecting those they saw as different from themselves when they had the power.

Our Founding Fathers saw it differently. A nation where all races, all creeds, all religions co-exist. Get along. As peers. As friends.

How are we doing?

James Spangler, OD, is a Warren resident.