Somehow, I have moved through an Irish-American life without ever pasting a shamrock on my door, flying an Irish flag, or having “Erin Go Bragh” tattoed on my biceps.

This does not mean I have denied my origins. My mother and father were both from Ireland. Irish songs filled the air of the places where we lived in Brooklyn, where I was born. My parents and their children, marched for many years in St. Patrick’s Day parades. For fifty years in the Irish diaspora, my mother picketed British consulates and the appearances of high British poobahs, demanding justice in Northern Ireland.. I’ve lived in Dublin. I’ve been enriched by Irish literature, by Yeats and Joyce and O’Casey, by Blind Raftery and Flann O’Brien, by Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney. As a reporter, I’ve covered many events in the long terrible grief of Northern Ireland. I’m an American. But part of me is indelibly Irish. I’ve just never felt the need to proclaim that Irishness with empty symbols.

But, alas, symbols do have some power, a dismal fact underlined by reports from Boston. As reported originally in the South Boston Tribune, and later in the Boston Globe, the well-meaning folk who run the Boston Housing Authority have included symbols in their attempts to promote racial tolerance in city housing projects. The symbols are part of the curriculum in their diversity training programs. Among the symbols that could be called “controversial decorations” are the swastika, the Confederate flag, the flag of Puerto Rico, and the shamrock.

This has caused something of an uproar. Bunching the shamrock with the swastika is sure to raise some temperatures (although as recently as the mid-1960s in Dublin there was a laundry called Swastika & Bells whose trucks roamed all over town emblazoned with the ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis). Irish-Americans interviewed in Boston insist that the shamrock is a harmless expression of pride in the Irish heritage. “A swastika, of course,” one Irish-American said, “but I’ve never heard of shamrocks being bad. It’s Irish. That’s it. It’s nothing negative.”

On the level of common sense, this seems to make sense. Hitler converted the swastika into a symbol of evil. The Confederate flag can be interpreted as a defense of slavery, rather than states' rights. The Puerto Rican flag can be viewed as a continued call for independence, or a protest against the American domination that was imposed at gunpoint during the Spanish-American war. But the shamrock?

For many Irish-Americans, the shamrock is part of the green-beer-kiss-me-I’m-Irish nonsense that engulfs us all on St. Patrick’s Day. It might have had some purpose a hundred years ago, when anti-Irish bigotry was real, wounding, and sometimes dangerous. In that era, in Boston or in Ireland, brandishing the shamrock was often an act of defiance. It said, “I’m Irish, I’m proud of it, and I’m here – so what are you going to do about it?”

But that era is long gone. In 1960, Jack Kennedy’s election brought a permanent end to the Stage Irishman, that slippery stereotype created to protect the weak from the strong. If an image could be presented of impotent, drunken, blarney-spouting Irishmen, then the men with power had nothing to fear. But as someone said, Jack Kennedy was more Harvard than Southie, and his style and sense of irony ended the stereotype forever (just as Jackie Robinson in 1947 consigned Stepin Fetchit to history). Today, Irish-Americans run major corporations, banks, and media companies; they edit mainstream newspapers and magazines; they publish best-selling books; they have triumphed in politics. Last year, almost nobody referred to the Irishness of Mark McGwire; in fact, most of my Irish-American friends were like me: they were rooting for Sammy Sosa.

In short, the descendants of Irish immigrants -- like the children and grandchildren of the Italians and the European Jews -- are no longer marginalized. They have little need to wave flags, to assume attitudes of truculent defensiveness. The Irish-American today can look at 19th century cartoons of simian-like Irishmen and laugh out loud, or make some ironical remark. Most of the rage is gone. To be sure, if they were assaulted by some fool about their origins, they would react. But the reaction would almost certainly be verbal, a cutting remark, a dismissal of the ignorant. The Irish in America no longer need the brickbat, or the shamrock.

They certainly need waste no anger on the little rumpus in Boston. It’s an amusing sidebar to the story of the Irish in America. Only a lunatic would proudly display a swastika. Only an adolescent fool would wave a Confederate flag. As a symbol, the Puerto Rican flag is more complicated; even the island’s political status is a blur; but when that flag billows in the breeze of Boston it is also symbolizing a powerful choice: to live in the United States, not San Juan. It is a statement of sentiment, like singing “Mi Viejo San Juan.” Its actual location has the greater symbolic weight.

In the end, you give your life meaning by the way you live, not by the symbols that you present to others. The Irish don’t need the shamrock anymore in America. If they remember where they came from, they don’t need diversity programs either.