American sick of Irish people telling him what being Irish means (xpost r/gatekeeping)
Posted Jun 5, 2017, 12:49 AM UTC
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Soccer. That sport is soccer. We won we get to name it.
Snapshots:
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does this bot read the post with text recognition or just make random quotes?
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It's allegedly only semi-sentient but everyone knows Yankbot achieved consciousness years ago.
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I'm fairly sure it was just playing dumb for the first few months it was around.
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Haha! My girlfriend is a mentor for an international student buddy program thing at uni, so I meet a lot of Americans through that all the time. On St Patrick's Day this year, I got dragged along to this thing where one of her American mentees was playing a gig at a bar. Her songs were ok but, in between them, she kept droning on and on about her family's deep connection to Ireland and how, even though she was American, really she was Irish.
My Mum's Irish, so at the after party I went and talked to this girl to see where all this old-country patriotic self-identity was coming from. Turns out that one of her great-great grandparents was Irish and she'd been to Dublin once for 2 days..
I'm sure she orders one of those green McDonald's shakes every year on St. Pat's, though. That counts as being full-Irish, right?
I've been thinking about this a bit more since I told this story, and I think I can maybe justify / rationalise this behavior.
Imagine being born an American, growing up, looking around you, and concluding that it isn't really something you want to embrace. One day, a grandparent tells you an interesting story about your Irish ancestor, and you subconsciously just latch onto it because it differentiates you from the herd and makes you a bit special (in your head).
Before you know it, you're listening to the Dropkick Murphys and getting a fucking shamrock tattooed onto your bicep.
Standard teen identity crisis. The grass is always greener in someone other culture's garden. But most people grow out of that fairly quickly.