I was expecting Irish schadendfruede.
Although I generally identify as Italian (mostly because of food, family, and mood), my dad had red hair, freckles, and relatives in Somewhere County.
My ties to the old country are quite attenuated, but I’ve been around Irish-Americans most of my life, so I knew they’d be a little overjoyed when Queen Elizabeth II passed away.
Mostly, I thought there would be bad jokes and a few tasteless toasts to his “Hell-th.”
But I hadn’t anticipated the level of vitriol triggered by the passing of the world’s longest-reigning monarch.
It never occurred to me that people I knew and liked would be posting memes about the dancing jigs and the potato famine (which happened, uh, almost two centuries and in which Elizabeth Windsor, old as she was, had no hand.)
I was surprised to see otherwise sane friends posting diatribes about the colonization of their tiny piece of land by this vandal queen.
I had to blink twice at the historically suspicious websites they linked to accusing the Queen of atrocities that violate the Convention Against Torture. It was surreal.
Worse, however, was the thinly veiled defense of the Irish Republican Army.
When I mentioned that the IRA had murdered Lord Mountbatten and his innocent 12-year-old grandson in a bombing in the 1970s, those who chose to engage with me tried to do this “whataboutism ” in which I myself have come across some regrettable occasions.
Let’s be clear: the British have been brutal in Northern Ireland, but that does not excuse the killing of an innocent child (or other innocent children targeted by the terror group).
And when I say terrorist group, I mean terrorist group.
To call the IRA freedom fighters is to fall into the same trap set by Rashida Tlaib, who refers to the PLO with the same kind of terminology, or Ilhan Omar who has a hard time condemning people who kidnap and behead Christians. Terror has no passport, no nationality.
But to be honest, the worst comments weren’t from what they called “Irish Twitter”, but rather from people who like to appropriate the misery of ancestors they’ve never met and the grievances they’ve never met. they never suffered.
You have the typical comments like this from a Carnegie Mellon professor, someone named Uju Anya, who tweeted: “I heard that the head monarch of a genocidal thief and rapist empire is finally dying. May his pain be excruciating.
The university issued a statement condemning the comments, but she will not lose her job. Imagine if a white professor deliberately used the wrong pronouns of a prominent trans activist. They would be suspended. They actually (googling.)
But a black woman can make despicable comments about a (then) dying monarch who never hurt her, who never even met her and who probably has nothing to do with the phantom terrors whose rear -Anya’s great-great-grandmother suffered, and she deserves the applause. of thousands.
This is the world we live in.
After the death of my mother, I received beautiful tokens of sympathy from my political adversaries.
The vast majority of people were kind, because in times of our deepest grief, most human beings follow their best angels.
There were, however, some people who emailed to rejoice.
One particularly cruel comment was, “Wow, your mom hated you so much she chose death over cohabitation.”
This reader knew that I had lived with my mother all my life and had placed this knife directly between my ribs to twist it.
It hurts. I can only imagine how the British royal family feels right now, if they make the mistake of checking social media and reading things from mediocre creatures like Professor Carnegie Mellon, people so insane and narcissistic that they have no place in their hearts. for grace.
I guess none of us should be surprised at the reaction to the queen’s death.
There has been such a hardening of discourse, fueled by the aggravating factor of anonymity on social media, that it is rare to find true, pure and benevolent sentiment when a public figure dies.
Even someone as universally beloved and uncontroversial as Elizabeth triggers anger and resentment in those who live to find fault, who mine grievances like the Molly Maguires mined coal, who abandon any pretense of decency to feed the gods of their cult of victimhood.
Frankly, right now I’m as interested in the evils of the British Empire as I am in those perpetrated by the Roman Empire.
The recent character of the alleged atrocities does not distinguish them, for me, from the massacre of Christians by Diocletian, and the bones of the persecuted in Africa have the same weight as the bones sealed in the walls of the Roman catacombs. History is full of evil, and some of it was committed in the name of the empire ruled by Elizabeth’s ancestors.
But she did none of that. His legacy is one of service, duty, obligation, decency and honor.
She deserves to be recognized for what she has done, not for what she carries on her shoulders through a historic power of attorney.
Shame on those who don’t understand.
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