Who are history’s winners and losers?

“In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people…”

Those haunting words are the first two lines of a poem called “Quarantine” by Eavan Boland.

Boland, an Irish poet and professor, died in her native Dublin at the end of April. She was 75. Twenty years ago, I’d have said she’d lived to a ripe old age. Today, I’d say no, too young.

“Quarantine” is a poem about a man and woman in the grip of the Irish famine. The year is 1847. The devastating potato blight that eventually reduced Ireland’s population by a third – death plus bitter exile – had started in 1845 but was in deadly earnest by 1847. Bodies were strewn on rural roadsides and mass graves were filled with emaciated corpses.

One of my great-grandfathers left County Mayo as a little boy with his family in 1847, in “the worst year of a whole people. . .”

I love the study of history and I think that in hard times like our present moment, it’s good to reflect on the past. Because, as my great-grandfather reminds me, it relates to us. Not because misery loves company, although history indeed records misery, but because it puts our short lives and our anxiety into perspective. History made us.

So when I see armed men carrying weapons of war into our state capitols like homegrown terrorists, I reflect on Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, The FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough.

Do you remember that both the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol saw bombs detonated in the 1970s by self-styled “revolutionaries”? I’d forgotten.

Then there’s the Civil War, our bloodiest national conflict. Newer estimates place the number of dead at 750,000, including those who died in squalid prisoner of war camps. A great-great-grandfather of mine, this one not Irish but a Confederate from a long line of Virginians, survived one of those camps.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust examines how the encounter with death on a scale no other American generation had ever seen changed our national perspective on life.

Recently, our Attorney General, William Barr, repeated that well-worn phrase “history is written by the winners.” I wonder how history will judge our current leaders, including Barr. And I hope that those of us living through this moment do our part to influence that history.

I’m not suggesting you spend all your time in social isolation perusing history’s sorrows, and if you spent your first days of isolation bingeing Tiger King, I understand. But occasionally, pick up a history book. Maybe read about the Great Depression that your parents or grandparents lived through.

Or read Exodus or the Gospel versions of Christ’s Passion. Or the story of Jesuit Father Alfred Delp, who died as a resister in a Nazi prison, or Blessed Franz Jagerstatter who refused to serve the Nazi regime and was executed. Or the four churchwomen who were martyred for refusing to leave El Salvador.

And ask yourself that rhetorical historical question, who were the winners and losers there? What measures a winner?

I think about our present moment and how short life is. But I also think about Great-grandpa Gaughen. After escaping famine, he picked slate from coal as a nine-year-old in Pennsylvania, eventually becoming a miner. Then he headed west, first marrying the daughter of Irish immigrants. Together they raised twelve kids on a large Nebraska farm.

I think he was a winner, and his story gives me hope.