I was talking about a future story with an editor and this column came to mind—you know a subject has affected you when you remember the name of somebody from a story after 20 years. I certainly remember Riva Feldsher.
When Riva Feldsher got a letter from the government telling her that the $484 monthly check she lives on would stop coming in 90 days, she wasn't upset.
The letter was written in English. Feldsher, a Russian immigrant, can't read English.
Had the letter been written in Russian it wouldn't have made a difference because Feldsher, 83, is nearly blind after a stroke several years ago.
Once the news was explained to her, Feldsher reacted with resignation.
"What am I going to do?" she said through an interpreter. "I am an old person. The only choice I have is to go on the street and die there."
Feldsher is one of about 22,000 elderly or disabled Illinois immigrants — 10,500 over age 75 — facing a similar prospect over the next several months, as government subsidies are taken away from them in the name of welfare reform.
"It is going to be devastating," said Barbara Otto, executive director of the SSI Coalition for a Responsible Safety Net. "People count on this monthly cash assistance to pay for housing, clothing, food."
Karen Popowski, executive director of the Polish American Association, called the cuts "a national tragedy in the making."
"It seems unreasonable and inhumane to achieve cost savings by denying subsistence benefits to elderly and disabled legal immigrants," she said.
Two federal programs are affected by the cuts — Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, and food stamps. Last August, President Clinton signed the welfare bill, and it will go into effect between April 1 and the end of August.
Chicago's Latino Institute estimated that the state will lose $130 million a year in federal aid.
"Even if private agencies and religious-based providers fill the gap, there is no way they can replace $105 million in lost benefit in Illinois," Otto said. "Absolutely no way."
The Latino Institute and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago hired the Urban Institute of Washington, D.C., to study the taxes paid in Illinois by immigrants vs. the benefits they received.
"We found that Illinois immigrants pay $3 million more in taxes than they collect in benefits," said Pamela Seubert, director of government programs for the Jewish Federation. "So ironically, while people talk about immigrants being a burden to society, their tax contributions leave money on the table for the rest of us."
To escape the cuts, immigrants have several options. They can prove they have been employed for a total of 10 years while in the United States; that they are veterans or on active duty in the military, or that they have become U.S. citizens.
None of these options is available to Feldsher, who came to this country in 1991 from Kiev. Her husband and her only son had died, and her younger sister in Chicago was all the family she had left.
Feldsher expected, she said, to enjoy a small stipend similar to the one the Soviet government paid in consideration for the years she worked as a bookkeeper.
Asked if she could learn English and pass the citizenship test, Feldsher hurried to bring out her Stalin-era medals to show she was a hard worker who helped win the war against the Germans.
"She is worried the government thinks she is a thief or a bad person," said Jane Tannenbaum, a social worker assigned to Feldsher. "She does not understand how the government can take away her 'pension' — she thinks of it as a pension. She takes it very personally."
Asked whether Feldsher could pass the test, Tannenbaum said: "She thinks the television is talking to her. Sometimes she talks back. Since she had a stroke, she is nearly blind and faints."
"I can't pass it," Feldsher said. "I can remember everything going on in my childhood. But not much else."
Even sharp-minded immigrants who want to become citizens might find themselves in a Catch-22, losing benefits at least for a few months, because of delays in the system.
"A legal immigrant to the United States cannot even file their application for naturalization until they have been a resident in the U.S. for four years and nine months," Seubert said. "The minimum amount of time it takes to process an application is six months."
But the wait to become a citizen is expected to be even longer.
"The INS has now elongated the FBI fingerprint checks— which are required by statute — and the INS expects 1.8 million applications this year, as opposed to 1.2 million last year, without additional resources. So we expect to elongate the minimum to nine months and probably in excess of a year," Seubert said.
Rob Koon, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, confirmed Seubert's figures, but added that the increase in applications for naturalization cannot be attributed to welfare reform.
"We've been seeing an upswing in naturalization applications since fiscal 1992," he said.
Advocates for immigrants and the elderly find it a cruel irony that welfare reform should be balanced on the backs of powerless immigrants.
"The purpose of welfare reform was to move people to the workplace (who) should be working, but 40 percent of the cuts (under welfare reform) are in SSI, a program that supports elderly and disabled," Otto said. "The public does not understand where these cuts took place, I believe. The general public did not intend for us to rip away the safety net from people who will not transfer to work or cannot naturalize because of the disabling process of aging."
Federal officials hope that changes can be made before the new law transforms into widespread human hardship.
"The president, when he signed the welfare bill, mentioned this as the part he was trying to fix," said Hannah Rosenthal, regional director of the federal Health and Human Services Department. "He has proposed that elderly legal immigrants should be allowed to get their SSI. He is pushing that, but Congress is being difficult."
Rosenthal said the president's proposal has "a chance of working," which does not translate into much hope for the elderly immigrants of Illinois.
"Now that they understand this means they will be losing their money, their anxiety rate is even higher," said Donna Pazutto of the Council for Jewish Elderly.
For Riva Feldsher, the anxiety is expressed in hoarding what little income she has.
"She has started spending just $1 a day because she thinks she will be out on the street and need money for food," said Tannenbaum.
What she is worried about losing is a $250-a-month studio apartment, decorated with a huge photo of her deceased husband, a photo of her sister, and three identical pictures of a grinning little boy, cut from cereal boxes, carefully propped up at each place at her tiny kitchen table.
They keep her company, her social worker explained.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times March 27, 1997
To find out what happened next to Riva Feldsher, click here. for the follow-up.
A guy takes one day off...
Tries to stretch a long Labor Day weekend to my parents in Colorado. And look what happens. Rahm Emanuel takes his ball and goes home.
I can't fish for pity. Because City Hall dean Fran Spielman was also on vacation the day Rahm Emanuel threw in the towel. Knowing Fran, that has to sting, unless of course Rahm timed the announcement so Fran wouldn't be there to grill him like a chicken wing. Then it's a compliment. Besides, she already had turned up the pressure on him last week.
And the truth is, I stopped paying attention to Rahm a long time ago.
After Laquan McDonald, Rahm Emanuel seemed exquisitely beside the point, as if he too had been gunned down that October night on South Pulaski Road. Did the mayor cover up the shooting? Or was he just willfully ignorant of the tape? Let the voters decide!
Either way, he certainly was powerless to curb violence in Chicago. Or indifferent. Voters were calling for his head, demanding that he resign. The police he was sucking up to certainly didn't like him any better. There must have been blood in the water, because a dozen opponents were jostling, piglets at the trough, to challenge him.
Now they've gotten what they wanted, sort of. A slow motion resignation.
I thought Eric Zorn hit the nail squarely with his observation that now Chicago can have an election about the city's future and its multitude of problems and not a referendum about the past and how Rahm didn't fix all those problems.
Not that any of these chuckleheads running will fix them either, those I suppose some would fail more spectacularly than others.
Seven years. The Era of Rahm Emanuel. Let the assessments begin! I can't say I miss him. At first my view was, "He may be a jerk, but he's our jerk." The jerk working hard for the City of Chicago. A working jerk, the political genius we need to fix our pension time bomb, our staggering schools, our bleeding neighborhoods. It seems only yesterday Rahm was such an appealing politician we half assumed he had to be slumming, merely running for mayor of Chicago. Just a gig, the day job to keep him in fighting trim while he Talleyranded his path to the Oval Office.
Now both mayor and White House are both bespattered. Maybe that's it—the presidency is so diminished, it's ready for Rahm to assume his rightful position.
Nah.
Out of office, he'll go from being our jerk to just a jerk. I can't pretend to care what Rahm will do after he leaves office—make more money, I suppose. Join Rich Daley in whatever half-light limbo netherworld former Chicago mayors reside in, limiting themselves to four or five locations and a few dozen cronies and, of course, foreign travel and buckraking. We still have months of victory lap, of self-congratulations and flattering figures to endure. He did spruce up the river, I grant him that.
"Do you want the window seat?" my wife kindly asked as we finally reached our row toward the rear of a Frontier flight.
"I do!" I said, then, recovering, "You can have it on the way back."
There is a certainly childishness to gazing out the window during airplane trips. One that I've never outgrown. I not only gaze at the clouds all around and the landscape far below. Sometimes I'll even exude "We're flying!"
Because most people never will.
On my recent flight to Denver, I also had this colorful woodpecker on the winglet—the proper name for the turned up portion on the wing that decreases drag—to keep me company.
The bird helped. Otherwise, it was a typical full, charmless flight, the kind that really underscores the "bus" in an "Airbus 320." The typical, out-of-left-field mishaps. Someone on Frontier messed up the security check or, rather, misplaced the paperwork, and after all the passengers had finally filed on, we were immediately told to begin filing off, and half the plane was emptied before a pilot finally noticed the documents where they shouldn't have been, tucked behind a visor.
To make matters worse, the flight attendant working the microphone fancied himself a comedian, and kept up a steady patter that was supposed to be funny—he welcomed the Denver-bound passengers to our flight to Salt Lake City—but quickly began to sound somewhat unhinged.
After we took to the air, in a very turbulent flight, I took comfort that somebody at the Denver-based budget airline had the graphic sense and presence of mind to add this avian companion. About a dozen years ago, as it turns out. It made up for the glitch when leaving and its companion snafu arriving, as the plane was left five feet short of the gate, causing another delay.
I hadn't seen the entire plane on the way in. On the way out, I saw this row of Frontier jets. Obviously, the animal graphics is a Thing at Frontier. Good call. Now if they could only perfect the whole filing-security-check paperwork Thing.
Lost?
I'm reading a new report claiming Chicagoans "lost" an average of 503 days commuting over their lives, time they "waste" traveling to and from their jobs.
I am agog, aghast and aquiver.
Waste?
I have been commuting in and around the Chicago area for ... 35 years now, going to newspapers in Barrington, Wheaton and, since 1987, downtown Chicago. I've gotten to work by foot, bike, car, cab, train, bus. I once hitched a ride to the office from Belmont Harbor in a lovely Chris-Craft cabin cruiser.
However done, commuting has always been among the most pleasurable moments of the day.
Going back to that first job, at the Barrington Courier-Review, driving my grandmother's little blue Chevy Citation. Stopping at a Dunkin' Donuts to pick up breakfast—a raisin bran muffin and, for desert, a chocolate chip muffin. Reaching into the bag, pulling up the top—the best part, dense and glossy and delicious—and pressing it against my lips.
Lost?!
I lived in Oak Park when I started working at the Sun-Times, and did at first view my daily commute downtown with alarm. For about for 10 seconds, then shrugged and decided, "I'll just have to read 'Remembrance of Things Past' then." Sitting in the front of the 'L,' a fat volume cracked in front of me, occasionally glancing up from the gardens of Combray to watch the city rushing toward me.
Waste?!
Some of my most memorable moments came during a commute. After we got married, we moved to East Lake View. Sometimes I'd take the 151 bus,. An elderly gent once tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I didn't realize young people still read Thurber."
"We do," I replied, smiling. "And thank you for calling me 'young.'"
To continue reading, click here.
Technology actually hasn't been changing as fast as it used to. Cell phones are more than 30 years old. Personal computers too. The Internet has been a public commons for more than 20 years. Changes now seem slower, more incremental.
It's hard to recapture the anxiety that all this stuff originally created. I was searching for something else, and happened upon this column from 1997.
As a guy who used to watch the attendant at the Clark Station check the oil and hand sticks of gum into the back seat to us kids, notice my terrified approach toward a gas pump credit card reader, and my wonder at the cleverness of "swiping." To be honest, at 58, I feel far less angst about shifting technology than this young man of 36 apparently felt. So that's good.
I used to worry that if I beeped the car horn too hard, the air bag would explode in my face.
Thus I always tried to gently press the horn, and not hit it sharply, so as not to antagonize the thing and get it mad at me.
The concern was that the air bag would deploy, scare the bejeezus out of me, drench me in talcum powder and maybe even cause an accident.
The bags use talcum powder for lubrication, I heard once.
I have since learned more about the bags. So now I worry that I'll beep the horn too hard and the air bag will deploy and kill me.
That's progress.
Some days life seems like a grim plodding from one vague technological dread to another, wrapped in a patchwork of half-knowledge and doubt woven out of the dubious information washing over us daily.
Is the nightstand clock throwing off a low-level, cancer-causing electric field, or did that turn out to be a myth? Will the whiff of fumes when I remove the dry cleaning bags from my clothing aggregate over the years and bring hideous death? Is coffee good or bad this week?
Modernity has always been daunting and scary. A hundred years ago, James Thurber's aunts also worried about electricity leaking out of empty light sockets. His uncles treated those newfangled automobiles like a particularly stupid brand of horse. The toaster was a menace.
Thurber himself was forever struggling, with automobile tires and telephones and all the trappings of the brave new world of the 1930s.
How would poor, half-blind Thurber make it today?
Not too well, I'm afraid.
We've moved away from balky manufactured objects—stubborn umbrellas, blenders that don't—into an incomprehensible digital world.
Last Wednesday night was a perfect example. I was dog-tired, dragging home about 8:30 p.m. The "EMPTY" light had been burning on the dashboard for two days. Time to fill up the tank.
I stopped at a gas station on La Salle Street. Just another pasty-faced guy after work, his tie knot slipped down to his sternum.
A gaunt bum with a squeegee shambled over. I was about to wave him away automatically when I realized the windows were, indeed, dirty.
"Go ahead," I said.
Normally I go in and pay—clinging to the transaction, a vestige of all the jogging Texaco men from lost days. But I was short on cash, so submitted to the seduction of the credit card slot in the pump.
Whoops, backward. Finally got it right. Don't use these much.
I began pumping gas, keeping a close watch on the squeegee guy. Sometimes those squeegees have a sharp edge, and can scratch your car.
The tank was filled. The windows cleaned. I checked to see that the gas cap was on. Checked the pump to see if it still had my credit card—no, it was one of those swipe things. Clever design, I thought as I returned the pump nozzle. No chance of leaving your card behind.
I gave the squeegee guy two bucks—tried to make a little small talk, to be a human. He said he was using the money to take a bus to a shelter. I mentioned that I've eaten at the Pacific Garden Mission, and the food was hearty. He said the food there aggravated his ulcer.
I pulled out of the gas station. Whoops, lights off. Hadn't checked those. Turned the lights on. Maybe a minute later I was driving up La Salle Street, when a thought struck me: I hadn't ended the gas transaction, hadn't gotten a receipt, hadn't pressed a "STOP" button. The squeegee guy must have rattled me.
I tried to push the thought away and continue home. Those pumps have got to have some sort of mechanism that resets themselves, either after you return the nozzle or after a brief idle span. They can't just sit primed with your credit information, waiting to dispense more gas to anybody who happens by.
Can they?
The image formed immediately. A long line of cars, snaking down La Salle Street, forming in front of the Free Pump—already an urban legend. Some feckless victim put his credit card in and didn't get a receipt. The next guy just picked up the hose. Word spread. By morning I would be a "bright," an amusing little story used to fill out columns in every paper in America:
"CHICAGO -- Bar patrons occasionally buy a round for the house. But gas station customer Neil Steinberg accidentally bought a round of gas for some 200 grinning customers -- at a cost to himself of nearly $ 4,000 -- at an Amoco station here after inserting his credit card into a pump. 'He's an idiot, and we're going to make him pay his bill,' said Visa spokesperson . . ."
Sighing, I turned the car around and returned to the station. There was already somebody at the pump —a young guy on a motorcycle. I pulled over to him and rolled down my window. What to ask? "Hey guy, are you paying for that gas or stealing it from me?" That wouldn't do. I was at a loss. He seemed to be pushing buttons. A good sign.
Wordlessly, I pulled out of the station—again—and headed home, resigned, weary, at the mercy of giant forces I could barely understand, never mind conquer.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times April 6, 1997
Uniformity is the watchword of the suburbs. What's the line? "Little houses made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." Not entirely true, but true enough. Yet some people do manage to manifest their personalities. A neighbor on my block not only maintains this very stolid concrete goose, but will deck him out in appropriate seasonal attire: a little Cubs outfit for summer baseball, a pilgrim hat and cloak come Thanksgiving. It's very whimsical.
At least I assume it's his handiwork. I suppose it could be his wife's, but the baseball regalia makes me suspect him. I don't rightly know. In 18 years, I've never remarked upon the goose to my neighbor. I don't see him often, our interaction is pretty much limited to half-hearted waves and wan nods. We keep our distance, here in the great generic sprawl.
But lately I've been tempted, next chance I get, to say, "I like your goose."
Why? Whimsy does not play as well in some quarters as others. While I smile at the goose and welcome his calming presence, I have also on several occasions noticed him toppled, even broken—by what passes in Northbrook for hooligans, I would imagine. It's always sad to see the fellow in disarray.
My neighbor, to his credit, is always scrupulous about immediately setting the goose right again or repairing him, as need be. Or perhaps replacing him.
That is as it should be. It shows grit. We open our hearts to the world, reveal a glimpse at our inner soul, and, more often than not, the world rewards us with a kick. Even when we are doing something as unobtrusive as presenting a bit of anserine decoration to an anodyne suburban block. You have to wonder what sort of person would assault the thing. Merely being young and stupid doesn't seem sufficient cause—if the armies of the young and stupid turned against lawn decoration, not a gnome or ceramic frog would be safe. I imagine the culprit or culprits are people with no interior lives to project, lashing out instinctively at those of us who do. There's a lot of that going around.
There are 171,476 words in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, from common—the definition of "set" runs 22 closely-packed pages—to pleasantly obscure: "aglet," for instance, the hard tube at the tip of a shoelace.
Quite a lot, really. But not enough to cover the range and complexity of human experience, judging from other languages, which have words for concepts that we can't express in a single term. The Japanese word mibojin comes to mind: it means "widow," though its literal translation is "not-yet-dead person" with all the obvious implications of superfluousness: a woman without a husband is just sitting around waiting to die.
Perhaps another language can serve up the elusive word to describe how I'm feeling toward Donald Trump. Readers certainly offer their opinions:
"Why the hate for TRUMP every single day" writes J.T. Kozlov, forgetting his interrogative punctuation.
"Your level of anger and hate is debilitating," Stephen Hardy writes.
"All you do is write about how you hate Trump," writes Ron Olovich.
I could give 100 more examples. They believe I’m criticizing Trump — not every day, I must point out — because I hate him. Trump himself flings the word about. “The hatred and extreme bias of me by CNN has clouded their thinking” he tweeted Thursday. It’s easy to see why. With “hate,” Trump and his fans can pretend he isn’t being criticized fairly, but out of blind animus. Projecting hate upon the president’s critics ignores their valid complaints. It’s in harmony with the frothing, head-exploding reaction they like to image takes place among those they sneer at as “libtards,” horrified by Trump’s unending vandalism against our country, its laws, traditions and values. Back in the non-fantasy world, all the libs I know are in full if grim possession of their unexploded heads, while of course giving those heads frequent sad shakes of amazement.
“Amazed” is closer to the mark, but not quite right. “Shocked”? Not anymore.
Not hate. I certainly don’t hate him. He’s hardly worth hating. Honestly, if Americans elected a dog as president, would you hate the dog?
What’s the right word?
When Riva Feldsher got a letter from the government telling her that the $484 monthly check she lives on would stop coming in 90 days, she wasn't upset.
