From - Thu Aug 16 19:55:07 2001 Message-ID: <3B7C177E.F47E3D61@clark.net> Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 14:57:02 -0400 From: Tiny Human Ferret Reply-To: klaatu@clark.net Organization: copyright 2001 all rights reserved -- non-UseNet transmission prohibited. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.17 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.politics.immigration,md.general Subject: Re: Long-timer Latinos near DC Upset with "Newcomers" References: <3B792F06.84B03874@clark.net> <3B7A9858.924F63CA@clark.net> <75He7.374$VI4.401318@news.uswest.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.205.1.226 X-Trace: vienna7.his.com 997988225 65.205.1.226 (16 Aug 2001 14:57:05 -0400) Lines: 184 X-Authenticated-User: tjh22isp Path: vienna7.his.com Xref: vienna7.his.com alt.politics.immigration:174216 md.general:26431 "Steve from Colorado (STVFRMCO)" wrote: > > "Tiny Human Ferret" wrote in message > news:3B7A9858.924F63CA@clark.net... > > "Steve from Colorado (STVFRMCO)" wrote: > > > > > Thought I'd throw this story from the Denver Post to add to the string here: > > http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1002,33%257E103260,00.html Ah, this is also sadly true in this area. If you want to pay the $1.50 to the _Washington Post_ archives, search for immigrants and trafic fatalities -- in one particular part of the region, Langley Park Maryland -- located astride the borderline between Montgomery and Prince-George's counties -- there are a huge number of latino immigrants, many legal, many not. Largely they're Central American. But the problem is that many of them have been known to do things that would be unthinkable to any person raised around significant numbers of motor vehicles. They do things like walk into the road with their backs to traffic, so frequently that when I see a latino walking towards the edge of the road, I have to slow down sufficiently so that if they step in front of me, I'll be able to stop. Many drivers are either not so aware of the problem, or are less conscientious. And yes, I know I am not being a good darwinist. But I won't have it said of me that I killed someone by accident. I've seen these people walk into traffic with their backs to traffic, walking _behind_ a parked car to get to the driver's door, which they unlock and open without checking for traffic. To me, this is beyond ignorance, it's insane if not willfully so. I mean, if you are behind the car, if someone hits it, you instantly are squished, if they hit the car and the car hits you and you aren't pinned to another car, you might survive with no problems. There's also a problem about stupid things like crossing the freeways. I mean, they don't take the overpass, or the pedestrian bridge, they walk right across the Beltway now and then. Or, they'll cross a state highway in an underpass, they can't see oncomnig traffic and nobody can see them, squish squish. It's very sad. It comes from unfamiliarity with traffic, more than anything else, I think. Also, sometimes you see them just walking across the street through traffic. Okay, this is a black thing or maybe a DC thing, but lots of suburbanites get all weirded out downtown because a lot of folks -- especially black folks -- will judge the traffic pattern and cross between the traffic, it looks dangerous but if you know what you're doing, you walk at a steady pace and the cars go a steady pace, it's all in the timing and hardly anyone ever gets hurt, nobody has to hurry or dodge, it's really sort of dignified. But you see, a lot of the latinos don't understand what this is about, it's like maybe they think it's a test of machismo or they just don't get it, it's all about timing and sequence. So they just walk into traffic like they knew what they were doing, and they wind up like a frog on the freeway, because nobody expects someone to just walk right in front of their fast-moving vehicle. The coroner generally writes it off as "death by misadventure". (meaning, "they did stupid stuff.) > > BTW, I took my daughter to the "People's Clinic" in Boulder today so she > could get her vaccinations for school. This is a community clinic that used > to be where the flower children went to get free to low cost medical > checkups and pre-natal care. We went there today just to get the required > shots "at cost" with my insurance paying for the entire visit. What a > lesson in the New World Order that visit was. We were the only Americans in > the place with white nurses trying to speak to Spanish speaking Mexicans > about the record of immunization their children had gotten in Mexico -- and > getting cold and puzzled responses from the Mexican mothers. The daughter > of one woman spoke good English but had no clue about what sort of > vaccinations she had gotten in Mexico. My daughter and I just left and went > to our regular health unit where I work for the required shots. Future > shock! Ah. Okay... I was awarded a disability some years ago, due to a post-traumatic stress disorder when I wound up homeless in the Gulf War Recession. So, after two years, Medicare finally kicks in and I want to see a doctor. That's fine... but in the time before Medicare kicked in, either I paid out of pocket (yeah right, on SS disability) or I went to a clinic. In the extremely affluent suburb of Montgomery County Maryland, I was told that I could make an appointment at the free clinic, and the appointment was two months from that day. (I had a severe ear and throat infection.) So, I did pay out of pocket, but went to take a look at the clinic. I was the only anglo there. I was almost the only male there! The place was wall-to-wall with mostly latinas, mostly pregnant, many with babes in arms and pregnant again. If you like fecundity, this would have been hog-heaven. I told them I needed to set up an appointment to get boosters for immunizations, etc, and they told me it would still be two months. I asked if there were other free or low-cost clinics, and they gave me a list, I had already called them all and they all had this two-months wait. And checking later, it was the same deal, almost all services were geared around pre-natal/post-natal care, almost exclusively by and for centralamericans. The staff was mostly latin or asian, the clerks were mostly latin or asian, basically the place was geared to making sure that taxpayer dollars went to make sure that the immigrants had healthy babies... on the one hand, this made me madder than hell, on the other hand, since the babies born here are Americans, I don't want anything but the best for them. I think its absolutely a good idea to make sure that _everyone_ has immunizations against communicable disease, and is checked for TB and/or HIV. But I don't think it's right that the overflood of immigrants made healthcare totally inaccessible for the native-born adult. And I guarantee, if the mothers were sick, the doctor saw them at the same time as they saw the baby, so two got treated for each appointment, leaving nothing for such as myself. Now, later on, I had dealings with the Maryland Public Assistance people, trying to get food stamps or employment training or job-placement assistance, _anything_ at all that would help me get better and get back to work. All clerks were immigrants. All signs were posted in eight or more languages, ranging from Spanish to Russian to Vietnamese to Korean, though I admit I didn't see any Koreans in there, because for all of their faults otherwise, Koreans usually go right to work and pay their own way for everything and don't usually demand handouts just for being here. But the lady interviewing me wasn't a native speaker of English, the name on the case-determination paperwork was Asian, the only US-born person I encountered as a staffer was someone I met later when I happened by the place while they were doing an office move. She and I got into a completely non-official discussion, and basically what had happened was that the Maryland department had been taken over by the Montgomery County department. Half of Maryland's immigrant population lives in Montgomery County. This lady admitted that mostly what went on was the immigrants deciding whether or not to allocate funding to other immigrants, or to citizens, and the citizens almost always lost out if they were born in the States, and she said that she felt sorry for me, since I was a white native-born male with all of his limbs, it didn't matter if I was mad as a hatter and incompetent to work, I wasn't goin to be getting anything out of the State of Maryland so long as there was a foreigner with a hungry baby that "needs the money more than you do". Later in the process, I found myself as nearly the only "anglo" in a waiting room, and I was commiserating with the other two, who were a couple of greek-Americans. (there's a large, very long-established sub-community of greek-Americans around here.) And they were discussing -- with acid sarcasm -- whether or not they should pretend they only spoke Greek to see if they would get preference that way, since it was pretty clear that since the place was set up to have foreigners give the tax dollars to foreigners, they only way they'd get squat out of the system would be if they pretended they weren't American, or that they'd _just recently_ gotten their citizenship. They agreed that the system definitely discriminated against even people such as ourselves, who had been raised in the County, and who had paid into the highly-taxing local government system for as long as we'd ever worked here. To add insult to all of this, I was recently ordered to go to a psychiatric interview to see if I could keep my disability. Frankly, since I made pretty decent money on my last gig as a UNIX sysadmin and I saved most of it -- frugality dies hard -- I'd rather the guy declared me to be competent, because that way my sworn testimony will again be admissible in courts. So who does the immigrant-run disability determination office send me to? A _russian_ psychiatrist. Someone who clearly got their training and credentials, judging from their age, in the old USSR, where psychiatry was a tool of the state and one of the premiere systems for suppressing dissidence. I wonder if he has any idea that I'm active in the immigration-reform movement, perhaps habits from the old days in the old country would make him consider it more progressive to the cause to declare me "delusional". Or perhaps I have insufficient faith in his professionalism. But who is deluded here? Me? Are you deluded into thinking that the tax dollars you pay, into Social Security and Medicare to protect you in times of need, will be available to you, the citizen, when you really do beed them? Is it a delusion to believe that your tax dollars will be administered by citizens, for citizens' benefit? Is it a delusion to think that your activist politics can never be the grounds on which a foreigner decides whether or not you are eligible for tax-paid benefits... or legally competent to testify against system-abusers? Are we deluded if we believe that our taxes pay for medical care or time in recuperation for injured or indigent _citizens_? I think it's time for everyone to start looking into where their tax dollars are going, who is administering the flow of those tax dollars, and to what degree the monies set aside for our less fortunate fellow-citizens are actually reaching the intended destination. -- Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae. 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