Trapped in Indy
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9/20/2013
Indianapolis could be a wonderful city. It has a jewel of a downtown with old brick buildings, a city market, beautiful parks, a glitzy mall and a fantastic zoo. Unfortunately, it is anything but wonderful. Indy has become a war zone. Homicides, robberies, rape, daily shootings, the entire spectrum of wild west society’s ills. Maybe it is because I am from Germany and not used to these kind of conditions, but the 9 out of 10 here on Sperling’s violent crime scale says it all. We live in a suburb and used to enjoy going to downtown because there are a lot of things to do. But due to the decreasing lack of public safety, we are nowadays just trying to stay away as far as we can from anything within and close to I-465, which has become a huge slum over the past several years. Driving here is a nightmare, driver’s ed is visibly optional and you need to become a master in defensive driving to avoid accidents. People don’t pay attention, are constantly distracted, drink and drive, are texting or using their cell phones while driving, and don’t seem to understand the easiest and most common sense traffic rules. I would like to suggest other means of mobility, but there aren’t any. No trains, no trams, no metro. I am not sure if public transportation would even be safe in a city that suffers from this much crime. The climate here is most extreme. Sometimes, spring and fall are gorgeous with very comfortable temperatures and beautiful trees and flowers. Summers and winters, however, are dreadful. Winters are often grey, windy and hardly produce any snow. And while skiing, sledding and snowboarding is not an option in the flatlands, some snow would still be fun. Summers are simply unbearable to us Northern tribes. Oppressive heat, jungle-style humidity, no rain. Grass has usually turned into a depressing prairie brown by July and water supply issues are becoming more and more frequent. Central Indiana also has violent storms and destructive tornadoes, so you constantly have to pay attention to weather warnings. In addition, more liberal-minded personalities will find it hard to be happy here because most Hoosiers aren’t liberal. To put that into perspective, a German conservative, loyal CDU-voter, could easily be considered a left-wing radical here in Indiana. It should therefore come as no surprise that bigotry is still present in and around Indianapolis and that most people inhale Fox News as if it was purest oxygen. I am sure native Hoosiers have better things to say about this area, so I do apologize for the negative sentiment. But if it wasn’t for specific family-related factors, we would have long moved elsewhere.
Max | Greenwood, IN