Are we at end of a time?

ast week a dear dear friend of mine, Jeremiah “Darby” O’Connor, was laid to rest. He was an icon at the Delaware Courthouse for more than 30 years and a beloved figure in the Irish community.

When I was at his wake, I turned to my wife and said that “This is the end of a time.” I meant that as a personal feeling and observation of my life, a life that was slowly disappearing. When I look back at my life, I feel at times that I was raised as much Irish as American. We went to the Irish dances, walked in the St. Patrick’s Parade, and listened to the Irish hour on Saturdays.

If you wanted to get my mother the perfect gift, it would be a book of Irish jokes, which would be basically a variation of the same joke for 40 pages of “Pat and Mike went into the bar, Pat and Mike went to work, Pat and Mike went to a wake.” You could give her the same book every year and she could be heard laughing late into the night as if she never heard the jokes before.

The day after Christmas she would be packing up the decorations saying we have to get ready for St. Patrick’s Day.

I thought of all of this as I looked around at the people at the wake and the funeral Mass. What I saw were people who were raised in one/two room cottages with no electric, no running water and a life so hard that they had to leave their home and travel more than 3,000 miles to a foreign country never to see their mothers and fathers again. They had limited education and mostly skills of farmers, not the skills necessary for jobs in a booming, industrialized country. But these same people, the ones I was now looking at, were now landscapers, carpenters, plumbers, house cleaners, nannies, who were seated next to their sons and daughters and grandchildren who were doctors, lawyers, business owners and most importantly, good neighbors and citizens. People who fell in love with their new country and added a splash of green to the color and culture of the red white and blue.

Looking at these people, I thought of the immigrants of today. The ones we call murderers, rapists, despicables. The same names these people in front of me were called, as when the professor of history at Oxford who said the Irish “were more like the squalid apes than human beings.”

And it made me think that maybe this is the end of a time. Not of my time but of our time as a people, of a country, of who we are or we thought we were. The end of a time when we no longer will have “these people’ to add to the color, culture and greatness of our country. Our leaders say they want merit-based immigration. I hear the president and others say we don’t want “unskilled workers but if you have a Ph.D come on over.” Well these people who I saw before me may not have had Ph.D’s or were “skilled” workers, but they were ”hard” workers who produced the Ph.D’s.

Then I saw hope again when I realized that my good friend Darby O’Connor was having his funeral Mass said at Villanova University’s chapel. A chapel and university built on proceeds secured after the hateful anti-immigrants of the last century burned down the first Villanova in Philadelphia. So maybe this is not the end of a time. These people, these new people, may talk different, look different, belong to a different religion, but they are the same people.

So God be good to you Darby O’Connor and God be good to the Darby O’Connors that are coming to our shores today.