Not that there were many Irishmen available to be coachmen because vast numbers of them, many brand new arrivals here, were elsewhere, fighting and dying at places like Gettysburg and Antietam so that the native born dandies in New York who wouldn’t fight for their country would be safe at home and able to hire coachmen or mistreat their Irish chambermaids.
It took years for the wave of Irish emigrants fleeing from harsh British rule and a famine that killed an estimated million and-a-half of them before it was over to lift themselves out of grinding poverty. And they did it on their own, without any help.
Where are my reparations?
As for making reparations to Native Americans, millions of our fellow citizens are doing that already, filling the swollen coffers of the host of gambling casinos thriving on Indian reservations. Long-gone Americans drove them off their ancestral lands. Today’s Americans are paying for it at their roulette tables or playing slot machines.
If there is any apologizing to be done, the Democrats in Congress should be doing it, atoning for $4-a-gallon gas that’s the direct result of their refusal to allow us to tap the billions if not trillions of gallons of oil lying untapped here, in Alaska and in the Gulf, because they won’t let us go after them and free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil.
If they want to chant “mea culpa,” let the guilt-ridden Democrats pay us reparations out of their campaign war-chest for getting us into this mess.