Happy St. Patty’s Day! While many of you are presumably going to be celebrating this evening reveling in the fine Irish tradition of bad alcohol and good company, we wanted to take the moment to remind — or educate — that the supposed luck of the Irish was not originally a good thing.

There are a number of apocryphal tales about Irish luck — it is doubtful that the stereotype has any specific origin provable with modern techniques.

But the supposed luck of the Irish is commonly associated with jokes such as, “well, they’re lucky to be alive!” or considered in light of Ireland’s history of being invaded and pillaged more or less for sport.

It may be shocking to many readers with today’s sensibilities that the Irish were subjected to a whole lot of bigotry — and relatively recently, at that, with anti-Irish sentiment still commonplace in the early 20th century — just about 100 years ago.

In fact, one interpretation of the luck of the Irish was that any Irishman who was successful had to have stumbled into it by “dumb luck.”

We hold this up both as an interesting historical curiosity that might spark someone to dive into an intriguing rabbit hole of research and, more importantly, as a timely example of how utterly recent our current world is.

Sometimes, it’s fun — and a little horrifying — to regard how fast the world moves. Consider your smartphone, formerly called a cell phone, or a mobile phone (so called to denote its difference from most phones which were fixed by screws and cords to a spot on the wall, or, even older, on a desk).

Today’s smartphone dwarfs desktop computers from the 1990s, for example.

That’s true for so many aspects of our lives. Technology has rendered our modern lives unbelievable to our forebears. Sometimes restored footage of early films taken around 1900 makes the rounds on social media — hordes of people, all long dead, wandering around a busy street, going about their daily business. Imagine what they would think of a supermarket!

Consider the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed on April 4, 1968 — almost 57 years ago.

Go into public and you can see people older than that, commonly.

Prior to 1974, women experienced discrimination obtaining mortgages and credit. 51 years ago.

Smallpox was eradicated in 1980. 45 years ago.

The USSR dissolved in 1991, forming 14 nations aside from Russia, including Ukraine. 34 years ago.

Facebook was founded in 2004. 21 years ago.

The Supreme Court granted same-sex couples the right to marry nationwide in 2015. 10 years ago.

And so on.

We take much of our current world for granted — how could we not? We get up, go to work, and live our lives…and things become normal without us even realizing it, especially in sleepy rural America.

And — that’s okay. The world will do what the world will do, as it ever has. Just be good to one another, and let God work out the middle.

But don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s happening, and don’t lose sight of the fact that, as women learned — many of whom had grown up under Roe vs. Woe (from 1973, so, everyone under the age of 52) — it can all come crashing down.

Our world is more fragile than it seems, and assuming that everything will work out fine with minimal disruption is a dangerous gamble, even in quieter times when our leadership isn’t actively trying to see what we can live without.

So go forth, tonight, and remember that today’s happy and goofy luck of the Irish is yesterday’s “Irish need not apply” luck of the Irish — and we need to work to keep it that way.