Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Lest you begin to feel good about yourself...

I'm a white Christian. This means that, other than having to budget an inordinate amount of my income to procuring bottles of SPF 80 for daily wear, I've pretty much never been persecuted.

(I am Irish. And my people are fond of railing about the potato famine as though it were a great injustice and personal affront and...not a fungus that didn't know you had a mammy and eight kids.)

I'm also a Jewish Studies major. (Don't ask why. It has nothing to do with Jews.) Which means that all of my classes are about people who have actually been oppressed. Usually by people like me. This semester, my final semester, I have a lovely complement of classes.

We begin the day with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This tells me that I suck, but at least other people suck right along with me.

Then I have Antisemitism Through the Ages. This assures me that I have always sucked.

Next is Jews in Modern Europe. Guess what? I sucked right up through the twentieth century!

Finally we wrap up with Jewish and Christian Responses to the Holocaust, making sure that I know I have a lot of atoning to do for the sucking, don't think you're getting away with one address at the synagogue in Rome, papist scum.

My other two classes are self-flagellating independent studies. One, my senior thesis, is on Nostra Aetate in twentieth century politics. I suck so much that I had to convene an ecumenical council to deal with it. And it's still the shortest decree.

The other one is a critical analysis of the implementation of the Good Friday Accords over the last ten years in Northern Ireland.

Yup. That's right. The British get to suck a little bit, too.

4 comments:

Eileen said...

My British professor of "Man and Plants" explained the injustice with the potato famine was that the Irish were dirt poor and starving and the British, who pretty much owned them, were thriving wonderfully and had more than enough to eat, but refused to send aid.

mi_morena said...

This is true, but they did sent a lot of aid- it just wasn't enough. When you have nine million people (that the British admittedly could take or leave) dependent on a single crop, that's not an easy situation to recover from.

As I recall, Queen Victoria donated something like 4 million pounds herself. That was sweet.

mickey said...

Why did you pick that major????

Eileen said...

Hm, true. Monoculture was the big issue. Usually never works out.