Understanding Chicago

Most people don't really understand what it means to live in a city like Chicago. With the recent story that Forbes Magazine had declared that Chicago was the "third most miserable city" in America, most of the world probably scoffs at the idea of the Second City and assume that we are all a bunch of frozen, snowbound, miserable, angry people huddling around broken pieces of furniture that we are using for firewood. This isn't really the case. In fact, of all of the cities I have been to (and I haven't traveled the world, but been to enough of them here in the US) Chicago is one of the most pleasant and with generally friendly people.

You see, Chicagoans have a bit of a chip on their shoulders. We are a 'flyover' city in a state that generally has the same designation. This gives us a kind of inferiority complex that actually makes us revel in the things that the rest of the world would find so miserable to live with. Is the weather bad here in the winter? Hell yes! It's freaking freezing here and it snows constantly. At the same time, we laugh at the rest of the world when they get barely and inch of snow and then shut down every part of the city including the schools.

This recently happened in Washington D.C. and the President made a comment about it. He made it light and as if it were a joke, but he was very true. If there were a nuclear attack we would still send our kids to school in Chicago. We take a certain pride in the fact that our schools stay open even as eighteen inches of snow fall and then it all freezes into hard mountain-like hills all over the streets. It toughens the kids up, we figure, and turns them into proper Chicago who will, eventually, retire and move to places like Arizona, Florida and California but still carry that Chicago chip firmly on their shoulder.

What this fails to recognize, to the rest of the world, is that we have a number of low-income families who cannot afford daycare so they use the schools as a place to deposit their children when they have to work. Without the schools, there would be huge amounts of people having to take days off when they possibly cannot afford them. There would be hundreds of children with nowhere to go. For the most part, the schools are a short walk from the people's homes and the city does what they can to make sure the kids get there safely. So, there is a method behind the madness. We are not all systematically trying to freeze our children to death here.

At the same time, if you grow up in Chicago, or the state of Illinois, you take the corruption of politicians as a matter of course. What often surprises us is how surprised everyone else gets when the news turns its light toward us and exposes that corruption. It happens here in Chicago as well whenever the news gets light. Suddenly one of the newspapers will turn toward Mayor Daley and his administration and act surprised that the only way to get a city job around here is to know someone who works for the city.

Growing up, I knew this from the time I was old enough to start looking for a job. You look around at the nice cushy city jobs and wonder, how the heck can I get in there? It doesn't take long before you realize that the guy in that job is probably the brother of the guy running the department of the section of the city where that job is. If you don't know someone, it doesn't matter how qualified you may be. It's just a matter of course here.

Of course, everyone else likes to cluck their tongues and believe that their city couldn't possibly be that corrupt. Sure, like New York doesn't have its fair share of corrupt politicians and hasn't had a few shady deals in the Mayor's office or the governor's office. Let us not forget that the Governor of New York was recently ousted because of using a call girl service. At least, as far as we know, Blago never dipped his wick in company ink or anywhere else. If he did, at least you'd think he'd fix his hair.

Chicagoans enjoy the toughness that comes with living here. The winters are things we brag about. Oh, it got down to forty degrees where you are? Hell, it was minus forty degrees last night and that wasn't even the wind chill, we are likely to retort as Los Angeleans start bundling up and acting as if igloos will sprout up along Sunset Boulevard.

We take pride in the fact that Al Capone used to live here and that he was almost elected mayor at one time. We enjoy telling the gory details about how seven men were lined up against a wall and shot in the back in a seedy, dirty garage during the height of his power. We love to talk about how he had secret passages all over the city. Again, it appeals to our toughness. It makes us sneer at the quaint gangsters we read about in New York and other places. Our psychos are more psychotic.

We also take a perverse pride in the fact that O'Hare Airport is a mess to get around in. At one time it was the busiest airport in the world but it has since been eclipsed by others. Still, we do all we can to make running from one side of the place to the other as difficult as possible. This builds character, we say.

We love the fact that, during August, it can get so hot that hundreds of elderly and sick people will die in their apartments. Again, this culls the herd, we figure, and just leaves those of us capable of handling the heat able to move around a bit more. Sure, we can also spend a few hours knocking on doors and distributing fans, but how much does a window fan really do when it's 104 degrees with 100% humidity.

We're used to being thought of as second rate. We are the city where the sports teams go on 100 year losing streaks of futility. We are the city that gets offended when those teams do manage to win and the rest of the world seems to bend over backwards to try and discuss how our teams really weren't that great or won by some kind of a fluke. It helps us justify the chip on our shoulders and helps us develop a decent Midwestern hump on our backs.

So, let Forbes and the rest of the world think we're miserable. We feel it's all justified. We just shrug and shift the weight of the chip. We stick out our chest and point to our baseball stadiums and the lake front and the skyline and speak about it pridefully. We point to the works of art in the Art Institute. We look up at the Sears Tower and brag about how it used to be the tallest in the world before some bastards in some country we never heard of built a couple of towers even bigger.

We are too busy mangling the English language or chipping six inches of ice off of the windshields of our cars to really care too much how the rest of the world perceives us. We are just arrogant enough to believe that, despite all of the recent event, the Olympics might still want to put the 2016 summer games here. What's the big deal? We might ask. This is just the way you do things here. We're a different breed. We do things differently here.