HOW SOON WE FORGET. SPUDHEAD NORM ROURKE VENTS

By Juan Montoya
One can fairly feel the pent up rage that Brownsville Herald letter writer Norm Rourke spewed in his letter to the editor on Sunday.
Besides complaining of the "whining and bleating" of "some people (especially illegals) who feel they have been mistreated, Rourke goes on to place himself as an example of someone who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps and – despite his poor origins – achieved what anyone else can achieve if they would just put their minds and elbow grease to it.
So, Rourke continues, those who complain about being mistreated should just "quit being punks running around with gangs who think they're so tough, but whine when they get caught and blame society for their stupidity."
It's easy enough to decipher through the rage that Rourke is a fourth or fifth generation Irishman descendant of those who came on the boat over the pond when they were starving over in the Emerald Isle.

If the surname genealogy is correct, Rourke is an Anglicization of the Gaelic personal name Ruairc.
Many of those with Irish heritage would just as soon forget why their ancestors braved the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean aboard the steerages of crowded ships to escape the misery of watching their children and families starve and death. And guess what, Norm? Not all of them got here legally.
In his heart-breaking account of the Irish Troubles and famine, The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, author Thomas Keneally, the same writer who wrote Schindler's List, tells of those Irish immigrants who – because they were denied entry to the United States for carrying contagious diseases or because they exceeded the national limit – came across Canadian border illegally.
Once here, they melted easily into the vast Irish enclaves in the East Coast. Those before them lent them shelter, formed protective organizations to allow them to assimilate into the cities, and put them on their way to becoming the Irish cop on the beat, the lawyer, or the school teacher.
But before that, they formed the sturdy back of the nation through working at the lowest levels of society and climbing their way up. 
They did not do this on their own. There were numerous protective societies that gave them a hand to the first rung of the American ladder. Glance at the want ads in the 1890s and early 1900s. Ads for janitors and maids were filled with the warning that "Irish need not apply." To their credit and that of their supporters, they managed to survive and become productive citizens. As always, there was omnipresent an element that filled the gangs of New York's East Side, Boston, and Chicago who fell into the criminal trap.
Just as the dwellers of the tenements in New York had their champion in Jacob Riis, the Irish did, too. Riis, an immigrant from Denmark, came to America in 1870, and experienced poverty first-hand before becoming a police reporter and writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people (all ethnicities from Irish to Jews) by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes.
His classic "How the Other Half Lives," subtitled "Studies Among the Tenements of New York" depicted the conditions in which the poor immigrants lived in squalid tenements in New York City. As a result of this work – and his alliance with New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt – a reformist movement coalesced and addressed some of the most glaring examples of the political and economical corruption that created those conditions.
No, Norm, things really haven't changed that much. It seems that history has a way of repeating itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce. And it seems like there is always someone like you who has no sense of his own past to criticize the new arrival to our shores and demonize him.
I thought we'd be over that by now.