Being Scotch-Irish (on St. Patrick's Day)

Many of my dumb-ass, anhistorical compatriots, like me, are Scotch-Irish; they suppose that makes them Irish.  I almost wish it did.  The true, complicated story of how the Protestant Scots came, under the Scotch-English Stuart dynasty, to supplant the Catholic Irish on their own lands, to take all their stuff, and drive them naked and starving into the hedgerows and ditches, is bitter and unedifying.  But that's the racial heritage that most Americans unwittingly (of course!) are celebrating on this dumb-ass American "Irish" holiday.  That's why I, though proud to be descended from Moses Moore and his child-bride Ellen Rockhill ("Irish as Paddy's pig" my mother used to say of their names), wear no green on St. Patrick's Day.   Besides, we Moores and Rockhills (Flemings and Gleasons) arrived in America a long while before the Potato Famine refugees, and were already calling ourselves Sons of the American Revolution, which we were.  What we thought of the new, poor, desperate, Catholic "Sons of the Old Sod" is probably what most Protestant Americans who were already here thought of them--not much. When then they invented St. Patrick's Day so they could march around and drink green beer and feel good about themselves, we kindly, if a little tepidly, wished them the joy of it.  But really it'd've been too hypocritical of us to join in.