Hey guess what alcohol is often used as a coping method by poor and disenfranchised people in order to get away, if only for a few minutes, from the absolute shithole that is their lives
I WONDER WHY a group that wasn’t permitted to own media, have privacy in their own homes, go to church or any other desired social gathering, and which was considered guilty until proven innocent might have turned to alcohol.
I also wonder why that might have happened at a time when drugging your children with alcohol would quiet their starving screams because the English stole all your food and you had nothing left to feed your babies.
(In other words any time you see the accusation of “they’re all drunks” leveled at any particular group, it’s a good time to ask what the Irish, Native Americans, Black men, American men in general in the 1930s, Soviet Russian men, and Indians have in common. If you came up with “oh! Absolutely crippling levels of poverty in the face of a government that either valued profit over lives or actively oppressed them, and an inability to change this due to the structural nature of said oppression,” congratulations, you know a depressing amount about history.)
