We Must be Talking

  Anger in America                     Gerry OShea Rage is dominating the American body politic. The culture has become so toxic that we can no longer just agree to disagree.   In April of this year, reputable pollsters revealed that 70% of Republicans declared that the presidential election was stolen and Donald Trump should be re-installed in the White House. A September gauge of opinion showed that the figure of Republican disbelievers in the Biden presidency has grown to a whopping 78%. It is important to explain that there is not a scintilla of evidence supporting this erroneous contention. Mr. Trump’s lawyers’ claims of electoral impropriety were considered by close to sixty judges, some of whom were appointed by the former president, and none of them even allowed the case to be heard because no evidence of wrongdoing was presented in court. The Supreme Court with a strong influence of Trump appointees refused even to consider the case. The Department of Justice under Wil

  How Did they Pass the Union?           Gerry OShea How did they pass the Union? By perjury and fraud; By slaves who sold their land for gold As Judas sold his God. And thus was passed the Union By Pitt and Castlereagh; Could Satan send for such an end More worthy tools than they? Grattan’s Parliament, an Irish deliberative assembly, met in College Green in Dublin from 1782 until 1800. It had limited legislative powers and its members, drawn exclusively from the Protestant Ascendancy, were certainly not representative of the Irish people. Catholics were excluded from serving in parliament due to the Penal Laws which marked them as ineligible for any public office.  The Pitt mentioned so damningly in John OHagan’s poem was known as William the Younger who served as British Prime Minister when the abolition bill passed parliament and, in fact, he became the first prime minister to assume the title of PM of Great Britain and Ireland in January, 1801.  The success of

  The Ongoing Story of Racism in America         Gerry OShea The enslavement of black people provides a poignant narrative central to understanding the story of America, and there are two versions of that story competing for emphasis in the media and in the curriculum in the country’s schools. One stream is aptly represented by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a major research effort published to coincide with the 400 th anniversary of the arrival of the first slaves from Africa. Somewhere between 20 and 30 captives from that faraway continent docked in a coastal port near Point Comfort in Virginia on an August morning 402 years ago. Selling these dark-skinned people into slavery left them with no rights, completely at the mercy of their purchasers. Families had no standing; the children, barred from schooling, were bought and sold at the whim of their owners. There were no white slaves in America, so this represented the establishment of race as an indelible feature of America