Scandal, or Common History?

Ugh. In this overly dramatized, video-accompanied "top Sunday story" at the NYTimes, the American reader learns that in an impoverished land, children in the 1920s, 30s and 40s -- born into homes without fathers to help provide for them -- were often sent to institutions, where they suffered disproportionately from natural deaths including bronchitis, meningitis, tuberculosis, influenza, measles, whooping cough, and severe undernourishment...

And the women charged with caring for these children often did not themselves dig what we think of as "proper graves" and instead resorted to storing the bodies underground and out of the elements*, systematically providing for the bodies in the best way they could in those times. (Maybe they were more concerned with the care of those still living?)

I don't know what the purpose of this story is, other than to play up the new video capacities of the New York Times. Maybe it would have been better had these "illegitimate" children (the common term in use then) been aborted, in the new improved American way, nevermind the fact that many born into such poor circumstances indeed did survive and go on to lead productive lives?

Only in a land where people grow up playing tennis for a living, say, would we look back at hard times in history and posthumously condemn those who worked on behalf of and alongside the poorest of the poor who were unable to provide for their own -- and who accepted the deaths by natural illnesses prevalent at the time -- as dramatic fodder...

The Times really should hire some realists to their staff, Irish or not. Enough of the historical revisionists already. (I honestly wonder how many people even made it through Dan Barry's tortuous writing, here. The moving pictures are nice, if you are into that type of self-loathing, or finger-pointing, but I honestly do not think this is the successful journalism business model of the future, this attempt at looking back in horror...)

Let the poor dead rest in peace, already.
Surely there are more contemporary tales of suffering and woe here in our own country that better qualify as hard news and deserve the video attention now? I suppose it is easier to chase the shadows of dead children in a foreign land though, while overlooking those suffering poverty and illness here in America today.
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Full disclosure: My father was the eldest of seven, born in 1932 to a married couple in Abbeyknockmoy. He, and his siblings, survived those times in pre-war, rural Ireland, and the survivor's mentality in us remains strong. No apologies, nor guilt, here.

Life's realities can be harsh:
the poor children born into fatherless homes no doubt had it worse, but nobody ever said life was easy. That's an American invention, it seems. People believe it today at their own peril.


* Read closely, and don't miss the key word "disused".