The lower classes of Roman Catholics in the country were very ignorant, and made a ready prey for any bad leading and bad passions...and the least suspicion of proselytising on the part of Protestants... was quite enough to drive their Roman Catholic neighbours of a less educated class into paroxysms of senseless intolerance such as they experienced in Swords last week.Those words are profound, and still relevant today. Intolerance and upheaval is what happens when you have a few people inciting the less educated among us, by stoking fears and prejudices.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Christians Fighting Each Other in Ireland in 1908
I found this today and it's very interesting. It's a reprint of a newspaper article from a hundred and one years ago today (their time), when Catholics got angry about a local man, a Protestant who had a meeting in his store. It caused days of violence.
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Teabaggers do make for good cat's paws. I always found it interesting that things got incredibly hot in that respect right after the Obama Administration started targeting Off Shore Accounts.
ReplyDeletehmmmmmmm.
Unfortunately, a growing number of our population are growing more ignorant by the day. They don't or can't read and were never taught how to think in school so they are very susceptible to creeps like Beck and Coulter and O'Reilly and Savage and Rush and all the other nasties out there who are making millions by tearing down our country and our president.
ReplyDeleteBefore I retired, public schools in Florida were under the gun to teach a test designed to make politicians look like they cared about education. But they didn't and don't. They care about getting re-elected. Thus, the principal at my school thought we could and should do away with everything except reading, writing and math. No history, no English, no literature, no nothing except those three subjects because those three subjects were what was being tested and determined how a school was deemed to be doing its job.
This still goes on, day after day after day. And ignorant masses graduate (or not) to head out in the world to believe every crackpot they hear because they're knowledgeable and frightened.
I'm glad that I am old enough that I graduated right around the time they started all that testing bullshit. But even when they did teach history in schools, it was never really accurate and always whitewashed.
ReplyDeleteThose who forget history are condemned to repeat it.