Economic Disparity and Hygiene difference in USA nearly derails peace talks with North Korea

Dateline:  Palisade Drive, Fort Wayne, Indiana

January 17, 2019

Approximate text of 911 call - Fort Wayne City dispatch center:

"Hello - I am having great trouble."  "My name is Cindy...."  "My landlord crazy, he keeps telling me "No Coat, No Stay!!!".  

"I already pay $20 for room two nights!"   "He take $60 for bed - no bed yet!!"  

"Come help!"  "Please come help!"

Although they were buried in work, preparing for a potentially man-killing winter storm, the good protectors of this conservative Indiana town heard her cry in broken English and responded.

As is typical in Fort Wayne, the first police cars pulled up at 2816 Palisade Drive less than five minutes later.  A shivering, mature woman - so tiny next to the black-clad and bulletproof shielded officers of the Fort Wayne Police Department jumped shivering from her tiny Honda automobile, her face strained with worry and fear.

"That man crazy!"   "He take my money, but he say "no coat, no boots, no stay!"  

"Please please please, help me."

Context:  

On a prosperous but humble (by United States standards) street on the Southside of a community in the central United States (State of Indiana), a drama of great importance, a drama of culture, language - a drama of conflict, fear and compromise, had been unfolding for 24 hours.

At that address, admittedly by standards of any other country in the world - a mansion, at that Palisade Drive address of a small city (250,000 people) called "Fort Wayne, Indiana..."

In that small, inconsequential town, something of importance to the entire world was taking place.

Peace, peace was being waged that icy night:

Like a tiny but critical cog in a great wheel, these humble, decent midwestern people toiled in their fields and homes, factories, restaurants and of course, farms.

Ah, the farms of Northeast Indiana.

The land so rich, the water so plentiful both in mild summers and under sometimes two feet of heavy ice was that night as it has for untold millenia crisscrossing that town, that good rich flat land, and you could almost sense it under the rapidly falling snow, falling, melting then flowing in those wide, brown lazy rivers.

Three rivers.  Fort Wayne, an Indian village originally, named after a military strategic and well-known madman, the General "Mad" Anthony Wayne.

Allen County, Milan Township - like currents of health and rich promise, two rivers become one and they spill both East and West toward the destination all water eventually finds - the sea.

East to the great lake Erie, West then South to the mighty Ohio, the Mississippi, and finally rolling thick with Brown with not filth or pollutant, but a heavy milk-cream of good water and strong agriculture traditions that flowed past rich and poor, farm and city alike.

In a home built by his father, a boy who walked first down that street when it was new, a boy who like his father, worked hard, studied hard, prayed each day - he was troubled you see.

Peace - peace had been lost in his family's beautiful home.

My name is John Edward Charles Hubertz, and my family has toiled in this soil, raised proud sons and strong daughters, for over 230 years.

We are a family of teachers, a family of enormous and diverse faith.  Our family includes many faiths, many cultures, and many many stories from long ago.

I am neither young nor anything but what typically grows in this rich soil - like many of us here, I am hugely fat, powerfully built.  A man-mountain, fat even by standards of the United States (the fattest country on earth).

I was widowed four years before, but by faith and family tradition, I had not suffered this loss alone.

You see, in addition to hundreds of years of Catholic faith and tradition, my people on one side of our small but hard-working family, my people never live alone.  We are Anabaptist as well as Roman Catholic.  We are never alone.

We are Anabaptist, and we don't really understand the concept of "being alone".  Within our culture, that is simply not encouraged nor allowed.

As the police comforted the sobbing woman, alternately crying and pointing, shivering in her thin and humble coat as the cold prairie wind blew down that street, they gathered and tried to hear her story - the story of a stranger lost, confused, tired and frustrated to the point of literal madness.

She had told the fat man, the landlord-man of this street and this place, her name was "Cindy".  When pressed, she insisted that in her home country "China", that is her name.

At that moment, John Hubertz became concerned.  

Regardless of truth or fiction, without asking for identification, without challenging the obvious lie of both her arrival, her name and indeed, her national identity, hundreds of years of Indiana tradition reached toward this stranger at the gates of the city and extended a hand of welcome.

A hand of welcome, to a stranger, poorly clothed, confused, speaking a strange tongue and hardly able to assemble a coherent English sentence.

.

Externally, it might have looked like this old fat man was alone.  But then as now, today, yesterday - tomorrow, he was not.  

faith and tradition

Standing within and beside him, evident within the strength of his shoulders,