The word traffic raises my ire. There are many kinds of traffic, like automobiles, the internet, telephone, accidents, etc. Automobile traffic is the one that gets my nostrils flaming. Thirty-two years ago, I moved to Frankfort because the traffic around my home in Alsip was too heavy. I was a bike rider then and commuted to work by bicycle. Ten miles of pedaling was a healthy challenge every morning., and a hazard in the evening hours on the way home.
This morning, Saturday, I enjoyed the pleasure of driving Lovely to the mall so she could shop without me hanging around her every step. I was amazed by the number of cars on the road. When I first moved to Frankfort in 1991, US 45, also known as LaGrange Road was a lonely two-lane country road. The drive to Orland Park Mall was a joy. This morning, the traffic was heavy, with three lanes of traffic streaming steadily northward toward the mall. There was an especially heavy number of NASCAR wannabes inserting themselves in and out between lanes, recklessly cutting drivers off and endangering themselves and the rest of us in the process. Of course the towns in between have all grown Frankfort is up to twenty thousand, Tinley Park is over 100,000, and Orland Park is most certainly over 100,000. Many of these people have arrived by migrating from Chicago, and Indiana. Chicago is a jobs magnet, and the suburbs are their housing.
This drive got me thinking about Springfield, Ohio, a town of about 50,000 recently inundated with another 20,000 new people. Using a simple ratio, I calculated that for Chicago to appreciate the same extent of hardship, the city of 2,600,000 would have to absorb 1,040,000 new people overnight. Then, I rememberd that Chicago is a convention town. They often have several conventions in town at the same time and can house hundreds of thousands of people in the many hotels. But they couldn’t provide permanent homes for that many people without pushing them into the surrounding suburbs. Even then, the place would be overflowing with tents-camps all around the county. No doubt the weekend people-shot-count would increase. Some Chicagoans are reluctant neighbors even to people they know.
The drain on services would be heavy. The city would be hard-pressed to hire more social services clerks to fill out forms for new residents, and help would only arrive once they had the proper infrastructure to handle the crowd. As the years pass, the tent cities will become permanent, and the auto auctions will be short of used junk cars as the new residents will buy them up and begin driving to their jobs as dishwashers and grasscutters. The city council will be flooded with complaints from the original residents claiming that the local hospitals, like Stroger, County, Rush, University of Illinois, and Northwestern are all going bankrupt because of the flood of new patients coming to their ERs with new diseases they have never treated before. Why is it that the immigrants only become visible in hospitals? How could it be if they come with ailments from countries where healthcare is free?
Just yesterday, I was amazed when I had to take Lovely to Rush Hospital for an MRI that her foreign-speaking doctor ordered for her. Lovely can speak enough English to get by, and she needs help understanding the English words from another mouth. However, she has the luck of the Irish and always encounters a nurse or technician who speaks one of the foreign languages she grew up with. When we checked in at the MRI place the nurse detected her accent within a minute and asked if she spoke Polish. Of course Lovely speaks Polish. That ended her reliance on me. The nurse walked her to the MRI waiting room and inserted a line for use in injecting a contrast to make a better picture. A very attractive red headed technician arrived and within a few seconds she began speaking Russian with Lovely, and that totally ended my job as interpreter and demoted me to driver.
What amazes me is that every hospital or clinic we visit has foreign language interpreters on call to help doctors get the answers they need to diagnose. When a bill arrives from an insurance company, there is always one or more pages with instructions informing a foreign language speaking person of their rights. The instructions are usually one or two sentences, but these same instructions are repeated in many different languages filling two sides of a sheet of paper. Many of the languages use alphabet that are unrecognizable to me, like Russian, Greek, Chinese, and Arabic, and who knows where these countries are and what language they speak. What ever happened to the Ellis Island immigrants who were faced with only english speaking clerks checking them in. It doesn’t matter, we let them in and the government tells them they have rights now.
I feel for Springfield, Ohio. They have a huge cross to bear, but as good Christians, they want to do it. My kudos to them.
Filed under: Biography, health care, Immigration, Society | Tagged: Be NIce to Your Neighbor, Crowded Cities, Share the lane | Leave a comment »
