““When I started doing community organizing in Boston's neighborhoods, working on all the issues that had affected my family - violence, poverty, guns - I realized that the sooner the Irish of Southie came to better understand their history as an "inferior race" by English standards and learned what it meant to be Irish beyond the happy-go-lucky tunes and bloody fistfights of Saint Patrick's Day, the sooner they would acknowledge Southie's poverty and its manipulation by gangsters and politicians. And maybe even work with black people in neighboring Roxbury on common issues, like the fact that both neighborhoods had been declared "death zones" by sociologists. I also became obsessed with the connection between the work I was doing and personal recovery from trauma, as I got close to a number of mothers whose kids had been murdered in the city.””
