Dennis Plante wrote:
This is an extremely important occaission for our fellow citizens that
hail from Mexico. I know this to be true, as I have many Mexican
friends.
I was eavesdropping in a restaurant two or three neighborhoods away from
the Phillips/Powderhorn/Central triangle last week. The women in the
next booth, while I appeared to be stuck on the Strib's daily crossword,
were comparing these times to the ones their mothers and grandmothers
had described. Their grandmothers talked about how, when they came to
America, they all tried to be American, learned English, refused to
speak Italian or German or French or Czech or ____. My grandmother said
the same thing. (We are obviously not American Indian in culture, but
then, few in Ohio are. I had never seen an American Indian in the flesh
until I was about 27, when I observed men who turned out to be Mohawk
coming off construction sites in NYC.) Back to the women in the next
booth: their opinion seemed to be that the new immigrants don't appear
to them to be of the same mind about these things. It's a manifestation
of xenophobia, I suppose, but it set me to wondering how many other
people were of the same opinion.
Or maybe it's just tough moving over to make mind space for a different
way of looking at the world than anyone is used to seeing.
Maybe, all unconscious like, a person in city hall who does the
accept-or-reject part of dealing with street party permits, is having a
tough time making room on the bench. Maybe he/she is cranky. Have you
been down to city hall? Have you felt the tension and the disarray and
the closed downness of city hall? Now that's a crying shame. It's a
beautiful building, its functions are all essential to the running of a
city, it's where the city officialdom shows its stuff to the populous,
the people who work there are getting paid, if not lavishly, at least
they get "doable" wages. Why does city hall have a feeling of disarray
about it?
You may curse SSB and the previous council for dogs and hand plaudits to
the present bunch, but city hall was not only more open and welcoming in
all offices during the previous administration, but it felt entirely
welcoming and gracious.
Grouse, grouse, grouse.
IMO we should all have a party on the 15th of September at Lake and
Bloomington and watch the ceremony in Mexico on the big screen. Kewel!
There are about 900 people on this list, it would be a really BIG party.
Whoop-de-do and "dance like a wave of the sea." ("When I play on my
fiddle in Dooney/Folks dance like a wave of the sea....") W. B. Yeats.
WizardMarks, Central
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