Sympathy for The Snakes
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day in Ireland, which back in America is a day to celebrate the miniscule traces of Irish heritage people pretend to have so they can get blackout drunk for a guy that’s been dead for centuries. Compared to Ireland, the sentiment is the same, but the folks here are actually Irish, so no one is trying to out-do each other in lineage and only seeing who can be the most hungover tomorrow.
For me, I decided to avoid the festivities today as I went out last night to take photos and experience the atmosphere of one of Ireland’s biggest holidays, and I picked up a thing or two that I had never realized before:
The shorthand for St. Patrick’s Day is “St. Paddy’s Day” not “St. Patty’s Day”. Patty is what you make beef out of and is not a person.
The River Liffey is never dyed green like in Chicago or Savannah, Georgia. People here joke that it’s not necessary since the river is green year-round and making it greener does nothing for the day.
The snakes mentioned in the miracle weren’t actually snakes; they were pagans that were the pagan natives of Ireland. He drove the pagans out, not literal snakes.
That last one was something I never put too much thought into, because outlandish epics from that time period usually contained supernatural events that never happened, so I wrote it off as the people of the time using the superstition as a fact, much like that of Ancient Greece and even Roman lore. But now, as I’ve been driven out of my home, labeled as a ‘snake’ by those more pious than I, the realization of the snakes being a metaphor hits me so much harder than it ever would have before, because they had to make the same difficult decision that most of us in the community are having to make:
Do you leave it all behind for another chance to live, or do you stay and risk losing your life because your existence makes people want to kill you?
It’s such a terrible feeling knowing that this still happens today, hundreds of years after the fact, and less than one-hundred years after World War II, which The United States’s trajectory is oh so similar to that of Germany in the early Twentieth Century. I’m sure my exact situation isn’t unique in the course of history, but to know that I spent so many years learning that the atrocities of Nazi Germany would never happen again to only have them happen again. There are too many things to grieve all at once, and each wave hits me hard enough to leave me as hopeless as I feel helpless. I had to make a choice between two terrible options, and either one will leave me scarred for the rest of my life.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I can only imagine that the grief we share so many years apart can’t be too different. The total loss of identity and connection to your homeland in such an abrupt manner, the numbness of having to make that decision and now living with it for the rest of your life isn’t easy, and very few people understand it, let alone empathize with it. People still treat this like I’m on vacation or give the most abhorrent advice I never asked for while I’m trying not to throw myself off a bridge because I have nothing left. I’ve had more nights of waking up, drowning in tears because anything that happened before 2025 feels like it never happened, and if it did, I have to lie to myself because knowing I’ll never get to see any of that again leaves me wishing I wasn’t alive anymore.
Those poor people that were uprooted from their home by force with no place to go, being killed because they didn’t match the conformity of the church, being left in their own sorrow as others looked on without remorse and continued life as usual. Were they as scared as I am now? Were they left to bear the weight of total loss all on their own, or did they pick the quick way out, so they didn’t have to feel the burden?
I don’t have an answer, and I don’t think I will for this. All I can do is put my words onto a screen and hope that you, the reader, can even empathize with me on what this experience has been. Last year, I was working at one of the most prestigious companies on the planet as part of the Upper American Class, and now I am preparing to apply for Asylum tomorrow: broke and alone. I still can’t comprehend how all of this happened so fast, and I may never be able to, but for now, I’ll mourn the loss of the snakes as I join them navigating my unknown future, fighting for a life I may never get to have again.
Sláinte