the burbs

When I was a little kid some friends of my parents moved out to the burbs, Westchester, to be exact and when we went to visit them they showed us their phone book and we laughed and laughed, what a thin little book.  We wondered what was the matter with them, why would anybody want to live in a place with such a tiny phone book? 

When I went to the U of I, hardly anybody was from Chicago, when you asked them where they were from they would all say they came from Chicago, but if you questioned closer they all came from Arlington Heights or Palatine or somewhere I had never heard of.  The biggest difference was they all seemed to have come from better schools, they had learned a lot of things that we had never heard of at Gage Park.

When I came back to Chicago in the mid eighties and worked for the state all the action was in the burbs, most of the manufacturing, most of the schools, most of the people were out in the burbs.  They stretch on and on past the nicely gridded city in a crazy higgedly piggedly jigsaw pattern fed by the curving lines of the Metra and the expressways.  You can tell almost right away when you leave the city for the burbs, the houses are further apart and they are bigger and sometimes there are no sidewalks because who wants to walk when you can drive.  A friend of mine said it best, it's a place where you drive miles and miles to get somewhere that looks just like the place you left.

No I don't like them.  I feel like they are places where deserters from Chicago fled to rather than staying in the city and trying to solve the problems.  I feel like they look down on the city and are afraid to go into it because they think we are thugs who will knock them on the head and take their money.  I don't like being there because all the buildings look the same, and all the stores are the same chains, and many of the streets are curvy so you never know where you are going, and like I said no sidewalks, and when you try to cross their roaring thoroughfares the stop light only gives you thirty seconds because they don't believe in pedestrians.

I hate them. 


You know we are in terrible financial condition.  The state is rated dead last by financial experts, and the city is in even worse shape.  I gave a friend of mine from California a tour of downtown yesterday and the streets and the sidewalks were full and all the businesses seemed to be booming and in the distance everywhere the cranes were putting up new skyscrapers.  So what gives?  We have a crazy union busting Republican governor and an entrenched corrupt Democratic house and Senate and it's like a WW I battlefield with bombs in air and eyes across the barbed wire and nothing being done.

I know I'm just dreaming but I am thinking of that teeming happy mass we passed by on the tour.  Couldn't we just pass the hat?  Everybody is leading the good life here, couldn't we all chip in something to make it right again?