To the Editor:
Your article about large Irish families (“As With the Kennedys, the Large, Boisterous Irish Family Is Fading Into History,” news article, Aug. 29) provoked some reflection for me as the second of nine in such a family.
There are three gifts of being raised in a large Irish Catholic family that I believe strongly influenced the Kennedys and many others. First, being raised as one of a multitude caused me and my siblings to be intensely concerned with fairness and equity. I think that this child’s natural concern that the pie be divided equally deeply influenced the development of American politics in the last century, and the decline of that sentiment may be related to the decline of the large family.
Second was the Catholic religion, which many may have drifted from in a formal sense, but which instilled in almost all of us the idea that there was something higher and better that we ought to be striving for, that injustice, poverty, strife and untrammeled self-interest were not to be accepted as the natural state of humankind, and that communion with our fellow men and women was both a duty and the purpose of life.
Finally, there was the daily breakfast-table example that very different people really could live together, if not always in peace and tranquillity, then in love, laughter, hope and mutual appreciation.
I will treasure these gifts until the day I die.
Patrick Marren
Chicago, Aug. 29, 2009
Note from KBJ: I hate to break it to the letter writer, but the United States is not a family. It is closer to a competition—with rules—than it is to a family.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 