The sound of America has changed

On the morning TV news there was a story about an Asian woman who had locked her baby in her SUV yesterday in the parking lot of a Costco in New Jersey.  The temperature outside was over 95F.  Shoppers in the parking lot heard the baby crying in the car, which was locked, and called the police.  The police arrived quickly, broke open the car to remove the baby who was by now soaking wet from sweat.  A few minutes later the mother arrived with a shopping cart full of purchases and another toddler in tow.  When she realized the police had just rescued her baby because of her own negligence she kept saying ‘I sorry, I sorry’ with sincerity.  But the crowd in the parking lot screamed at her that being sorry was not enough since she could have killed her baby.  They turned into an angry mob.  Part of the problem here was the language barrier.  I did not get the impression that this woman spoke English well.  That means she may not have been informed about the weather forecast.  I am sure that when she stepped out of her air conditioned car and turned off the ignition the car was still cool and she thought her baby would remain comfortable.  She was also probably unaware of the dangers of leaving a child unattended.  Of course leaving a child alone in a hot car is not excusable.  Nor were any of her actions.  But the angry crowd showed a total lack of sensitivity and impatience with her.  It was not very charitable of them.  The woman was arrested and the children are now in the custody of their father.  But I thought, however wrong her actions may have been, it would be impossible for her to defend herself given the language barrier, to the court officials, to the police or to the public.

I thought about this news report later in the day when a phone call was transferred to me by our Service Desk.  A nurse had a problem with his application software and called the Service Desk but they could not understand the caller’s problem, nor assist him, because of his heavy foreign accent,  They became critical of him and totally frustrated and told me so.  So I took the call.  I spoke slowly and asked him to speak slowly.  Having the advantage of being able to remote access into his laptop I was able to see the problem he was trying to describe to me.  I believe I was able to answer his question and resolve his issue.  At least I hope so.  He is a nurse, and I am sure a good one.  And we need nurses that speak languages other than English to assist patients who do not speak English.  But the key here, not  to pat myself on my back, was that I had to exercise patience.  It was not easy.  It is frustrating when you cannot communicate.  The Service Desk had given up on his problem.  And I think that in this multicultural world of ours, with immigration issues being the number one topic of the current Presidential election campaign, we all need to take a step back and accept that not all of us speak English with the same degree of skill.  We are now a diverse nation and English is not the native language of many of us.  It never was.  He spoke more than one language - if not all of them fluently. We only learned English.  Who is the better educated?  What was it like for my Italian grandparents when they first arrived in America?  They certainly did not master the 'King's English' immediately. Today's immigrants are better educated than most native-born Americans and they are fulfilling the high tech and professional jobs Americans cannot master. But we are all good people, all contributing what we can, and we need to start exercising a little more patience when we communicate with each other.  We need to just listen more, and criticize less.