I'm 100% Irish - I can trace both sides of my family back to famine immigration. I often refer to myself as Potato People.
Honestly, I'm over what the British did. I don't know how far back in history we should reach to find complaint, but I just can't rummage personal offense or personal stakes in things that happened long before my birth. I worry about what is done here and now, because it's the only thing we can have any affect on.
I'm saddened by the queen's death. Not because I idolize her. I don't care about the royal family (I could easily go the rest of my life without hearing about any of them). However, she was given a job she didn't expect, and she gave her life to doing that job without complaint. No matter what was happening in the country, she served. People focus on the wealth and the privilege, but being unable to express oneself, to live authentically, to pursue and experience privacy or partiality is its own kind of hell.
I admire the job she did and the dedication she showed in doing it. She was not emotive in an era where I think people mistake emotion for credibility. Our society is getting a little creepily North Korea-ish with its forced emoting as social signalling, so maybe I just enjoy its opposite in someone like her.
I think it's also hard for people who are not British to understand. I lived over there for a time, and she has largely been seen as the country's ever-present grandmother. Like the monarchy or not, her death leaves a hole in national presence, the ineffable and ungraspable element of national psyche that people in every country feel to some degree whether it be good or bad.
It's a sad moment. It will be over soon. People will move on.
We have our own presences in our lives. Look at the howling that results whenever some cable news figure is absent or gone or fired or retired or what have you. The CNN complaining has gone on and on and on (and on). But a historic moment of the longest reigning monarch in the Anglosphere dying is just too much for these same people to bear.
Americans worship celebrity and power and wealth just like any other country. Yes, us too. We like the powerful and the famous who we perceive to be on our side. Look at the complaints (and other actions) when some think their political favorite is getting insufficient adoration. There are figures from our side that I find it downright bizarre to insert and obsess over to the degree that we do.
The complaints lack in self-awareness, IMO. Humans are gonna human. Just because it's not directed to personal taste matters not at all. It costs me nothing to not care about eight billion things that are splashed across my eyes everyday.
Sometimes I get the impression people really have gotten the notion that all things in life must be tailored to their every mood and whim, and when they are not, it is a moment of greatest unholy indignation.
The greatest fantasy I've ever had shattered was that, once an adult, I would be living in a world of other adults. This prolonged eternal emotional adolescence is absolutely wearying.
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