“Let me tell you something, this is a sick town.”

A local businessman and I were talking several months ago as I processed his vehicle registration renewals. His response came after I asked him about a piece of property about two miles from my office, out on Erie Rd. maybe a half mile out of town. I drive past it every day, and couldn’t help but notice warning signs posted on the six foot tall chain link fence lining the property.

He told me the site had held an old factory that had dumped a bunch of chemicals into the ground. I recently did an Internet search, and the site is indeed designated by the EPA as a Superfund site, first proposed for cleanup 6/24/1988. It was actually an old landfill, and before that a foundry, and studies of the soil showed contamination of the following, probably due to discarded paint sludge (among other things): arsenic, iron, barium, manganese, trimethyl benzene, xylene, acetone, and aluminum.

‘Sick town.’ His words echo back to me almost every week, most recently yesterday. With a lobby full of people, a woman came in and asked one of my clerks if we could make a special accommodation for her husband who had a hard time standing or walking. After a quick discussion, she left the office and pulled her car into the alley next to the building to drop him off.

A few minutes later the door opened, and in he came. The lobby, with twenty plus people waiting, was instantly quieter, all eyes watching. He was wheezing so loud it was difficult to believe he could walk at all, sweating so profusely that he left big gobs of perspiration wherever he was sitting or standing.

And he isn’t the only person in town in such poor health, not by far. A little later in the afternoon a man came in shaped like a capital ‘C’ – back arched with age, head almost parallel to the floor. Where before he might have been five-eight or five-nine, he’d lost three or four inches to gravity and osteoporosis, and could barely look you in the eye.

I read the obits pretty regularly online, and can’t help but notice the variance in ages of the recently deceased. What would the average life expectancy be in a place like Albion, I wonder? Almost certainly below the national average –

This really IS a sick town. To me, it only emphasizes the class disparity in America, the advantages held by the upper and middle classes, and the difficulty in climbing the economic ladder. If America is a land of opportunity, then that opportunity might present odds that look more like a lottery and less like the true chance for improvement we’d like to think we offer everyone.

Or maybe the real opportunities available aren’t so easily recognized. Maybe we offer immigrants from Third World nations a chance at good, safe employment for fair pay that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

In light of the health care debate going on in Washington and around the country, I feel blessed to have the health care – and health – I DO have…