Celebrating diversity and cooperation

Unloading the car in front of my house at the end of the long Fourth of July holiday, I suffered a heart attack. The fire trucks arrived about a minute and a half after the 911 call went in, with EMS not a minute later. Within 20 minutes, I was in the hands of cardiologists at Elmhurst Hospital, a unit of the municipal Health and Hospitals Corp.

Who knew that Elmhurst had one of the best cardio units in the city?

The EMS team was a Hispanic man, I think, and a small Asian woman, who strapped me into the chair and carried me out of the room. My wife said she was the strongest woman she had even seen.

In surgery — and I was awake through the entire procedure — I heard nurses speaking to each other in a language I did not recognize. The lead surgeon had a South Asian accent; his colleague sounded middle American. By that, I mean his accent was one that would not be out of place in Indiana, or Iowa, or Idaho. I did not hear much Ivy League English in the hospital, but I heard all varieties of Queens English, and it was beautiful.

Obviously, all of the men and women involved in my care were American, and New Yorkers, but I am describing their differences here to make another point.

The team of cardiologists was headed by an American woman, which is to say I couldn’t identify a specific ethnicity or accent. On the day she was out, a Russian doctor led the team. The others were South Asian, Muslim and Jewish. My nurses were Chinese and Hispanic. The EKG technician was from the Caribbean. The woman who administered the echocardiogram was Russian.

The woman who brought my breakfast wore a hijab. On the third day, she told me I looked better. The nutritionist who explained the menu options was Hispanic. Breakfast the next day would be blueberry blintzes, she said, adding, “like a tortilla.” (Blintzes, tortilla, crepes, manicotti, New York dishes all.)

In the morning, I tuned the television to the Tour de France. The woman who cleaned the room said she had just started

riding with her fiancée, and hoped to start commuting by bike from her home in Harlem. The next day a young man exclaimed, “Is that the Tour de France?” He did not have a bicycle, he said, but as a kid in the islands, he built bicycles from discarded pieces. No one could really afford new wheels there, he explained.

At Elmhurst Hospital, diversity is not a destination. It is the everyday reality. Affirmative action mandates there are laughably irrelevant.

How far is that daily experience from academia, with its endless pronouncements about systemic racism, implicit bias and microaggressions? Or today’s Democratic Party, obsessing over identity politics and group grievances? From that perspective, inter-group conflict is an eternal and inescapable norm.

In recent years our political leaders have fixated on the places where we fail to mix populations successfully. Education in particular has become locus of great acrimony, pitting groups against each other as if they do not have the same interest.

But those are islands in a sea of diversity that is this city. Most of the time, we do not even notice. We work together and commute together and shop together with remarkably little friction.

When friction escalates into confrontation, or violence, New Yorkers are appalled, and our disapproval is genuine and heartfelt. We take note of such escalation precisely because it is the exception, not the rule.

Angry, insistent voices continually harping on the impermeability of group differences are infecting a virus into our body politic. But, as evidenced by their day-to-day interactions, most New Yorkers have been vaccinated against that disease. We want to live and work together, not to be lectured about how that cannot ever be possible

So thank you, Elmhurst Hospital, and thank you to all the New Yorkers who pulled together and saved my life.

Kroessler is a librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.