Turning green

It's almost St. Patrick's Day, which means the city of Boston is turning green. We already have a basketball team named the Celtics and a low-cost insurance company called Celticare whose ads feature people of color. Apparently “Celtic” is supposed to invoke Boston itself rather than an actual race or ethnicity.

By far, most of the “Irish” people in Boston have never seen Ireland and are five or six generations removed. And most by now are of fairly mixed ancestry – Italian, English, German, and whatever else. Those English and German ancestors in Boston were burning Irish convents and so forth 130 years ago. If you could pass for Anglo-Saxon at that point, it was probably very tempting.

And yet today, Irish is the most common ethnic identity in the state. Most of the country is has a plurality of self-reported German ancestry, but Southern New England claims to be very Irish.

To be fair: Boston does have actual Irish people. I have a classmate from County Mayo who spent the 90s in Boston associating only with other actually Irish people. And Boston did get a lot of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century.

Of course, if your family is recently from Nigeria, Laos, or anywhere else, your ethnicity is more than drinking green beer once a year. And many long-time Americans had their ethnic languages and cultures stolen from them by slavery. (See Mary Waters' ”Optional Ethnicities: For Whites Only?”)

Looking at children's names, Celtic names are in – Sean, Caitlin, Liam, and Maura are not just for Irish kids anymore. More obscure ones like Maeve and Callum might be for families who have some Celtic ancestry, but not necessarily. Even though most white Americans have German ancestry, nobody's naming their kids Klara or Emil. Lots of Boston-area residents have an Ashkenazi background, but those names are right out. Even people who originally had Yiddish names didn't keep them - Moishe, Schmuel, and Chavele became Morris, Sam, and Eva upon arrival on American soil.


"Celtic": not just for Celts

So why is Irishness so popular? It can't be the food.

They do have beer, but so does all of Europe and North America. They do have a firm pub culture, which might actually do a lot for a sort of ethnic identity.

Enough Irish came to Boston that they had a kind of critical mass here. It's more fun to be Irish with 3,500 of your friends than, say, Welsh with two of your cousins. And it's more worth it to open an Irish bar or dance studio.

The Irish as a whole haven't done anything too embarrassing lately (except decades of terrorism, which Americans didn't notice). German ancestry became a lot less popular with Americans after the world wars.

The Irish do have great music. Riverdance seems to have popularized Irish music and dance, albeit a quite stagey version. People seeing English traditional dance for the first time often ask me if it's Irish, maybe figuring that a cultural activity involving white people and fiddles must be Irish. And people who stare blankly when you say you like “American traditional music” smile and nod if you describe it as “Celtic” instead.

They speak English and have what's considered to be a cute accent. It's unclear whether there's something inherently appealing about an Irish accent. If only we had a way to find out if Bostonians in the era of “No Irish Need Apply” thought it was cute.

They have a body of myth, which appeals to aforementioned arty kids. But so does Scandinavia, and there's no craze to embrace your Norwegian heritage (unless in the Midwest?)

Anyway, I can't see any harm in this genealogical fad. I've been tempted to find some Irish ancestry for myself, but the best I could turn up was a lot of English people and one Scot.

Hunger hurts?

This is an ad for a food bank that appears on buses all over Boston.



Here we have a pretty young white woman hugging an older white woman. I guess the young woman is supposed to represent the food bank, since she looks happy, whereas the faceless older woman is presumably hungry and therefore in need of comfort.

Oh, wait. Except she doesn't need a hug. She needs groceries.

I have a rescue fantasy — what social worker doesn't? Somewhere inside, we love to believe that we could just hug our clients and make everything better. If we took them home and gave them a good meal and enough sympathy, we believe we could fix everything and earn their undying gratitude. But that is an inside thought. You do not tell your clients about that thought. The point is to help, not to feel helpful.

Please, people, fantasies don't belong on billboards. Everyone in the city who rides public buses — which is most of the food bank's clientèle — has seen this ad. If I needed groceries, would I really want to go someplace where I might get hugged by some misty-eyed young lady with a savior complex? No way.

What's inside

Some of my favorite patients at the hospital are hard-bitten blue-collar guys on their first psych hospitalization.  They haven't processed their childhoods or their issues or anything - it's all been stored up in there, and when they finally start to talk, it's so raw.

Last week I worked with a man who moved to this country as a child.  As a young man he joined a gang and served prison time for shooting someone.  Now he's middle-aged and the stay-at-home dad of young kids.  More than anything, he wants a paying job.  He kept telling me, "I want to support my kids and my wife. I want to be a good father."

Today I sat with a working-class man whose decades-long depression finally got noticed.  He hasn't told his grandmother he's in the hospital, and that's the part he dreads most: "I just can't stand to do anything that would worry her."  Most people in hospitals get teary when they think of how hard their life has been.  These guys tear up when they talk about the harm they might have caused others.

I once saw an unemployed carpenter calmly discuss his plans for suicide and then break down when he told me how terrible he felt that he'd left his dog with a friend and hadn't provided money to buy dog food.  My ex-gangster showed the most emotion when he talked about his mother, who had flown across the country to see him in the hospital.  He hated to think of the money she had spent on the ticket.  "I want her to move out here so I can support her. I want to repay her for everything she done for me."

If I had gone into some other field, I wouldn't sit around talking with murderers, child abusers, addicts.  And I wouldn't get to be there when someone finally speaks about how much he loves the woman who raised him, or about the pain he doesn't show to anyone.  And every time I think, Holy shit, I can't believe you've been carrying that inside you.

"...the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind."

- Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

What your hat says about you

Last night I was at a discussion where someone claimed to be surprised that anyone picks a car based on what "message" it sends about them. He felt it was very materialistic to do so, and said he would never think of buying a car in order to make a personal statement.

I doubt this is true. Several years ago Jeff's parents were buying a car and had the problem that one of the reasonably-priced and reliable cars they were considering was from a company with a reputation for luxury cars. This is a family that darns its socks, and they would be embarrassed to drive such a car.

I have the same dilemma buying clothes at the thrift store. I hate wearing something with a visible high-price logo, even though I know I paid $4.99 for it. I don't want other people to think I'm the kind of person who paid $70 for a sweater (whatever that "kind of person" is).

I think of it as the John Woolman Hat Problem. John Woolman was a Quaker abolitionist in the 1700s (before abolition was a thing, even among Quakers). At one point Woolman refused to wear dyed clothes, because indigo and other dyes were produced by slave labor. So he wore an undyed hat, but he had the problem that such hats were popular among young dandies. His pale hat made him look like someone who cared about fashion, which was not the image he wanted. In the end, he wore the hat and suffered a principled embarrassment.

Economist Robin Hanson calls this signaling. We all care what other people think of us, and we do lots of things to project certain messages about ourselves. Companies have an economic interest in getting us to signal "I am rich and have good taste" by buying expensive cars or whatever. But those of us who scoff at such things are trying to indicate "I don't care about such shallow things as brand names - I'm not materialistic like that." Which is, of course, its own signal.

Two love songs

One of my favorite love songs is the Roches' "Home Away From Home", about two vulnerable people finding each other.

She was twenty-six when she came to the 'burbs
Where the family secrets stop at the curb
I was nine when she moved next door
She had married a Republican, he was for the war

Over at my house, things were sad
Because my folks were always fighting - that made me feel bad
I went to her door with a cookie tin
I said I am your neighbor, would you let me in
She was big, having a baby
She asked me are you hungry and I said maybe
She gave me soup, a piece of toast
She gave me what I needed the most

Thank you for the love you gave
To me as a child
There must have been so much pain
That you never cried
In my home away from home.

Our society stresses romantic love, but sometimes it's the other kinds we need most. Love can be soup, love can be listening, love can be encouragement.

Another song that never fails to swell my heart is Dar Williams' "You're Aging Well".

Why is it that as we grow older and stronger
The road signs point us adrift and make us afraid
Saying, "You never can win,"
"Watch your back," "Where's your husband?"
Oh, I don't like the signs that the signmakers made.

So I'm gonna steal out with my paint and my brushes
I'll change the directions, I'll hit every street
It's the Tinseltown scandal, the Robin Hood vandal
She goes out and steals the King's English
In the morning you wake up and the signs point to you

They say,
"I'm so glad that you finally made it here,"
"You thought nobody cared, but I did, I could tell,"
And "This is your year," and "It always starts here,"
And oh, "You're aging well."

May you have a year of growing older and stronger, a year of love in unexpected places, a year of the signs pointing to you (wherever you are).

Something wrong

This week on the psych ward one of the patients was telling me why she came into the hospital.  "Sunday afternoon I was at church helping out with the coffee, and I started hearing voices. I was scared."

This woman is unremarkable by psych ward standards.  She's middle-aged and has been living with schizophrenia for years.  She wears the same clothes every day.  Her face shows no expression (possibly an effect of her medications).  Her conversation is polite, but it seems to take effort.

As she talked, I had a mental image of her behind the coffee table in a church parish hall, staring blankly, distracted by the voices.  I wondered what other people at her church thought, and instantly I knew - the same thing I would think if I saw her outside the hospital. "That woman is not normal.  Something is wrong with her."

And yet in the hospital, I notice the things that are right with her.  I expect to see someone with mental illness, so her slightly bizarre presentation doesn't surprise me.  What's noteworthy are the things that are going well - she's not suicidal, she recognizes her hallucinations as such, she has an apartment, she has a boyfriend, she knows how to get help.

In most of my life, I expect people to be whole and I take note when they break. In social work, I expect people to be broken and I take note of the ways they heal.

In reality, most of us develop "something wrong with us."  I and just about everyone I love have one thing or another - depression, diabetes, learning disabilities, overweight, chronic pain.  Some of us can hide it better than others. 

Let's be kind in each other's moments of pain.  Let's celebrate the ways we rise above.