Ancestry & Resistance

There’s my grandmother, Julia Johanna d’Oliveira, as an infant in her mother’s arms in Madeira, Portugal, ready to cross the Atlantic to eventually arrive in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1911.

There is my grandfather, Daniel O’Neil, shirtless on the left, in Marshfield, Massachusetts, with eight of the twelve children he had with Julia.

Julia endured a very difficult childhood and had to flee from her home in Somerville as a teenager. She survived and she thrived, becoming a kind of super-mother to twelve children.

Daniel O’Neil participated in the first strike of public workers in US history when the Boston Police went on strike in 1919, over deplorable working conditions, low pay and grueling hours. Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge fired the entire Boston Police force and forbade them from ever working for the public sector again. Daniel survived and remained a good father, helping to raise and provide for the family of ten girls and two boys.

And there is my mother Mary June Hanrahan, daughter of Daniel and Julia. Through high school, she cleaned banks in downtown Boston with her sisters and her mother before going to class in the morning. She went on to become a kind of super-mom in her own right, somehow raising four hardheaded and obstreperous sons, while also developing extraordinary skills in sewing and quilting, photography, the singing of traditional Irish songs, Irish step dancing and cultural event planning. She passed away in January, 2025 after a 15-year struggle with Alzheimer’s.

If the hapless fops, sadistic creeps and talentless fools currently occupying the executive branch and much of Congress think that I, as the descendant of the people described above, am going to cave and passively accept their twisted plans of achieving total power, then they are very sheltered and naive indeed. And if those same fops and creeps and fools think that all of the people here who stand with me, and who are likewise descendants of people who fought valiantly just to survive in this country, are just going to roll over and accept the rule of a grotesque caricature of a con man — they are going to be in for a very rude awakening.