Welcome to Chicago!

This is a hodge podge of ethnic groups. Most of the folks from the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent are the recent arrivals but, hey, what the heck.

A lot of the recent immigrants seem to be cautious and assume that they're going to be treated like "foreigners"...recent World Events don't help. I try mightily to remember that my folks were foreigners too. There was more of an attitude of "assimilate as soon as possible" back then...now it's not so fast. I try to act respectfully toward everybody...some of them are suprised. I get in a cab with a driver who is obviously "not from around here" and say, "...hey...you listen to NPR (seems like every cab driver has NPR on)? I listen to NPR all the time...what did you think of...". Okay...sometimes the guy is from some West African country and I can barely understand him...but I try to focus on the commonalities.

Once, a while back, on the day before the local Highland Games, I was on the commuter train going downtown. I saw a fair being put up and the men who were participants were black and were wearing these distinctive hats with a sort of peaked inner cap surrounded by a turban...some of the guys were wearing djeleba's...and I thought, "Wow...how odd." And then I remembered that I was going to go to a huge gathering of guys who wear kilts, throw telephone poles around, blow into leather bags with shrieking reeds attached and eat sheep guts. Who am I to judge?

I always feel that there are two significant things that can bring people together: food and music. That's why we have so many fests here in Chicago...food and music...maybe a little dancing. Trouble is that they don't have the one big master World Culture Fest that they used to have...now that was a blast and when I was a teen it got all of us together to par-tay!

It's tough but try...more good things than bad.

Best

AA