Here I was, walking across beautiful downtown Chicago in a charming drizzle, with gentle 30 mph breezes, the temperature a balmy 43 degree fahrenheit. (I love Chicago, even when it's being a beast, just like my wife.) Just to make everything perfect, I was dangerously hungry. No, I'm not diabetic or hypoglycemic; I mean dangerous to pigeons and small children and anything else edible that came within grabbing distance. Too hungry for whatever I could have grabbed at a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, and too busy to squeeze into a serious sitdown restaurant. Suddenly I realized one of the ways New York City has it all over Chicago: In midtown Manhattan at least, there is a Korean deli on every block. I think it's a city ordinance. There must be sidewalks and streetlights and Korean delis.
In my visits there, I've relied on the abundance of Korean delis to protect me from starvation and charges of cannibalism. Maybe others have had different experiences, but I always found a healthy variety of ready-to-eat foods, without having to wait a long time, and courteous service, and usually some modest sit-and-eat accomodation. Major convenience. And I never needed a stomach pump or antibiotics as a result of eating at one of these establishments.
Later, when I'd had a meal and my usual self-indulgent beverage, my thoughts drifted from Korean delis to Koreans in general, of whom I've never met any I disliked, to Asians in general, and immigrants in general. From there I thought that we tend to underestimate enormously what immigrants do for us, and we tend to overestimate enormously the problems they cause.
In my opinion, one of the faults of our culture is that we tend to like simple solutions, to deny that there's any such thing as a complex problem. Our patriotism also tends to be overly simplistic. In fact, in many Americans, it's jingoist and belligerent. Some think that the measure of how good an American you are is dependent on how well you speak English. Excuse me for bragging, but I know more about English grammar than the vast majority of those people, and some of those who get their noses most out of joint about the horrors of multilingualism don't know a nominative from an accusative and couldn't conjugate most verbs properly if their lives depended on it.
This isn't a profound statement, and virtually everyone has heard it: At any time, immigrants of the most recent wave have been a favored object of discrimination. I have thoughts about why blacks, regardless of how long their ancestors have been here, are perenially lumped treated as such a group, but that's a subject for a separate article.
So historically, many native-born Americans have tended to blame the "micks" and "chinks" and "krauts" and "spicks," but that's mostly our less cultured brethren. The more polite tend to say things like "the reason there's less alcoholism and crime in ______ is because it's a more homogeneous society." Which essentially means the same thing.
Ironically, we sort of know that this is wrong, so we make it politically incorrect to make any reference to ethnicity. In so doing, I think we miss the opportunity -- the obligation -- to recognize what immigrants do for us. Even those illegal immigrants from Latin America.
There. I said it. At some time in the near future I'll go into that further, but if I've annoyed you enough with that blasphemy, or by claiming that we Americans are not absolutely perfect, don't let it eat on you. Hit the comment button and tell me what you think. That's what I've just done.
Meanwhile, to any Koreans who happen to be reading this, please consider coming to America, settling in Chicago, and opening a deli in the Loop. If you have trouble getting a permit, talk to Mayor Daley and tell him you've always wanted to live where there were so many Irish-Americans.