Haunted by a Potato

It has been over a month since I returned from my first trip to Ireland and I find myself thinking about potatoes a lot.  Make no doubt about it.  Potatoes, as inanimate as they are, can haunt.

Like so many Americans, I expected (even felt entitled to) a vacation that was relaxing and rejuvenating and filled with fabulous scenery and beautiful landscapes.   Certainly, Ireland has all of those things and I am grateful to have enjoyed them for ten days.  But, Ireland also has potatoes.   Despite the fact that some Irish (or transplants from other European countries) wish to turn Ireland into another Foodie Capital of the known Universe, the potato still sits silently by.   It competes for another message that has little to do with paying far too much for a small portion of gourmet food whose aesthetic presentation make an excellent match to a wonderful bouquet of flavors:

While I had heard of the great potato famine of the nineteenth century, I failed miserably in appreciating the tragedy of it until I spent some time in the country that bore its history.   The penal laws of the 17th and 18th centuries set the stage for the Irish to lose one million of its citizens to starvation and another one million to emigrate away in the 1840's and early 1850's.  In one of the classic ugly stories of one flavor of Christianity pitting agains the other, the Protestants denied Irish Catholics the right to own or lease land, live close to a corporate town, or vote.   Despite emancipation in the early 1800's, Catholics continued to struggle on increasingly small pieces of land, paying high rents, and retreating further and further into subsistence farming until all that could feed a family was a crop of potatoes planted on parcels as small as a single acre.

All those potatoes were of only one species, so that when the potato blight came to Ireland, it took down almost the entire crop season after season, leaving fewer and fewer seed potatoes for the following season and decimating hope in greater and greater measure.

Despite the fact that a majority of Irish land supported successful crops of wheat, oats, livestock, and other bounty that had nothing to do with potatoes, a large portion of the Irish population starved, or left, and many who left then starved or died in passage.

As an incredible bounty of food shipped out of the country, insufficient or no help at all shipped in.   The British government, whether by incompetence or political chokehold, could not handle the disaster, and the tragedy of broken and lost life continued, year after year.

The great potato famine was not the first of its magnitude in the world, but the fact that the reasons for the tragedy originate in the corresponding tragedy of divisiveness among Christians makes it all the worse.   One would think that modern Christians, having the great Irish potato famine in their historical portfolios, would strive every day to overcome any barriers that stood in the way of unity.

Yet, we don't.   'Love one another' does not have an exception clause to it.  We need to try harder.   I think the greatest teacher of all time would have liked it that way.