1115.org

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a car accident before. Once when I was walking in my neighborhood, a car jumped the curb and hit a wall of a grocery store, but I’m pretty sure no one was hurt.

Wednesday evening, walking up the east side of 9th Avenue in Manhattan I hear some screeching and turned to look south as a taxi cab, not going very fast (his breaks had been the ones squealing) hit a light colored two door sedan traveling east on 50th Street. I have no idea who’s fault it was. Obviously they should not have both been traveling through the intersection at the same time, but given my assessment of the situation, I’m not sure either of them were where they were supposed to be.

The taxi cab hit the driver’s side behind the back wheel causing the sedan to spin 90 degrees ending up half on the curb facing north. Two pedestrians were hit. One had been on a bike (a delivery man) and the other was on foot. When I crossed the street, to where I had been standing seconds before the crash, both men were on their backs - neither were white and neither spoke English.

I suppose it makes me racist to admit that the first thing I thought was “the likelihood that either of these people have health insurance is very low and the likelihood that one or both of these people are in the country illegally is very high.” I was stunned.

I called the police, gave what information I could and hung up. Had I seen what actually happened in the intersection, I would have stayed to offer my services as a witness, but as it stood, I simply communicated to another bystander that I had called the police and continued my walk up 9th Ave. in a daze.

It was only then that it occurred to me that it could have been me. I had stopped prior to the accident to buy some thank you cards. After finding ones I liked, I doodled a bit. I paid with credit card, there was no one ahead of me in line. If any of these factors were a bit off, I could have been lying on the corner. In the card store I saw someone I knew, had I stopped to say hi, I could have been on that corner. And the irony is, it would have been much easier if it were me. I have health insurance, a savings account, loads of sick, personal and vacation days at my job, no dependents and a supportive family. Let’s face it, to be honest, a broken leg and a concussion, which is what I estimated the men’s injuries to be, would have been little more than an inconvenience to me (that, and a great deal of pain). Either one of these men may end up getting deported or owing a hospital thousands of dollars, or losing their job because they are in the hospital in stead of at work. All because of where they were at 6:37 on a rainy Wednesday night.

What kind of society doesn’t take care of the workers it relies upon? New Yorkers rely so heavily on cheap labor (as does the rest of the country) that I don’t even do my own laundry! One of these men was surely on his way to deliver hot food to some Manhattanite that couldn’t bear to go out in the rain. We rely on the spirit of people who flee their own country to come here because they’ve been told it’s better here. We abolished slavery over 100 years ago but we are content to live on the backs of people grateful to work for our pocket change. The least we could do is provide a sense of safety to those people who ARE here legally. I run an internship program for recent college grads at a multi-million dollar institution. The interns receive 200/week and no benefits. Had one of my interns been on that corner they would have been out thousands of dollars that most of them do not have. My fianc� doesn’t have health insurance as his COBRA from his last job recently ran out and he’s been freelancing ever since. I was walking to meet him Wednesday night; he walks slower than I do, had we been walking together we might have both been hit. This is no way to live. I’m sure the driver of the sedan as well as the taxi cab’s passengers will be suing for “whiplash” while the pedestrians, who had no part of this accident, were minding their own business, going about their day, and in one case actually performing their job, will be left to shoulder the burden of this accident on their own.