An Emerald in the Rough
Earlier this week was St. Patrick’s Day, the day when many Americans celebrate just about everything about Ireland and we all get to claim to be a little bit Irish. This does lead to a lot of drunken fights, but that’s part of being Irish too. Of course, the big Irish fight is the one between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is now mere grumblings compared to it’s former level of violence.
There’s two main ways to look at the dispute. Some will tell you it’s a religious war, pitting the Protestant North against the Catholic Republic. Others will tell you it’s all about self-rule, with the North being part of the United Kingdom and the Republic feeling rather ripped off about it.
But God tells me it was really about map aesthetics. From time immemorial Ireland has been called the Emerald Isle. See, they get a lot of rain, and that causes a lot of green stuff to grow with great profusion making the place as a whole pretty verdant. And emeralds are green, see. So, see, well, you get it I’m sure. Anyway, when you’re drawing your map and picking the colors to make each country, you obviously make Ireland green. But not Northern Ireland. Not the north because you can’t do two bordering countries in the same color and so in order to make the emerald isle, well, emerald, everyone always makes the bigger of the two countries the green one.
And the people in the north get this schizophrenic feeling that they should be green but they aren’t. So they get to feeling resentful deep down inside and it eventually ends up boiling out and, well, you get decades and decades of war without really knowing why.
Or at least, that’s what God told me.
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