The Irish are not just a bunch of leprechauns!

Today is St. Patrick's Day. If we follow the script, we are supposed to drink until our blood runs green and jig about like a bunch of leprechauns. Sounds fun, and it is, but it also is a bunch of blarney.

St. Patrick's Day is supposed to be an appreciation of all things Irish, yet we Americans have turned it into a big frat party. It's amateur hour over here in the States, and it paints the Irish in an unflattering hue. We seem to imply that their natural state is one of drunken foolishness, as if they were a horde of green-wearing wackos drowning in Guinness. We get taken with our own caricatures of them: Lucky and his Charms, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish mascot, etc. That's about as accurate as reducing Americans to flag-waving, gun-toting braggadocios....that is, there is some truth to it, there are some bad apples, but it's not the whole story. It is, in the end, an insulting reduction of who they really are.

With this in mind, we should still have fun, but I think we should do it a bit differently: take a deeper look at Irish culture. Listen to the music of an Irish artist like Makem & Clancy or U2. Read the poetry of an Irish poet like William Butler Yeats or Seamus Heaney, or the prose of an Irish writer like James Joyce. See a movie by an Irish filmaker like Neil Jordan or Jim Sheridan. Or go online and check out photos of Ireland - my Facebook profile has an album of photos I took on a 2004 bike trip up across Ireland.

Whatever you do, try to dig a bit deeper when you get your Irish on. Chances are, you'll like the pot of gold you find at the end of that rainbow.

Into The Twilight, by William Butler Yeats

OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is aways young,

Dew ever shining and twilight grey;

Though hope fall from you and love decay,

Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:

For there the mystical brotherhood

Of sun and moon and hollow and wood

And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,

And time and the world are ever in flight;

And love is less kind than the grey twilight,

And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.