I am an overprivileged, bigoted elitist. It's just a fact.
I grew up in an all-white suburb in the 1960s and 1970s and went to good schools. I had a stay-at-home mom who took care of the house and cooked meals that we sat down and ate together as a family. I wasn't allowed to stay out late on school nights or run around with unknown people. My parents looked after me pretty well.
I did have a wild period in my teens, but I got in far less trouble than I could have. I managed not to get pregnant or addicted to drugs. I turned out to be an okay adult. I was lucky. Lucky to have parents with a decent income. Lucky to live in a place where I wasn't in daily danger. I was a typical white, middle-class kid.
All of this, though, means that I don't know much about what it's like to be poor, or to be in an ethnic minority group, to be an immigrant, to be severely physically or mentally handicapped, or to have grown up feeling devalued by society. I try to be inclusive in my thinking, and to understand why others may feel and behave differently than I do, but it's a struggle.
Which is why it was uncomfortable for me to ride to work and back on the bus yesterday, something I hadn't done regularly since the early 1990s.
The #16 line on University that runs between Minneapolis and St. Paul is one that is used by a lot of lower-income people, mostly people of color, and quite a few handicapped people, if my rides yesterday were typical. My ride to work in the morning was mostly uneventful. I noted that there was a woman in a wheelchair riding. Back when I was a regular rider, wheelchair lifts hadn't yet been installed on most -- if any -- buses. It made me wonder what wheelchair-bound people had done to get around previously. My guess is that those who didn't have friends or family to transport them, or couldn't afford handicapped transit service, were mostly homebound.
On my way back from work in the afternoon, things got a little more rowdy. Downtown, a woman with a walker boarded, but couldn't unlatch the special fold-up seat that would allow her room to sit down in the adjoining seat. I left my seat to help, and bent over to get at the latch. A man boarding the bus squeezed past me, and commented "Full moon out tonight!"
Well, yes. I do have a large butt, and I was wearing light-colored slacks, and I was bent over. So I don't argue with his assessment. I did wonder, though, when it became acceptable to comment on others' anatomy in a loud voice in public.
The woman with the walker became engaged in conversation with an out-of-towner who asked about how to get to various places, and about motels near the fairgrounds. She was an authority on how to get around the cities by bus, and even knew the nightly rates of several local motels.
After she debarked, another woman, this time on a motorized scooter, used the lift to get on the bus. She had jury-rigged the scooter with several plastic bins in which she was carrying groceries. She had two signs on her vehicle: "Jesus Loves You", and "Find a Way Every Day to say I Love You and Thank You". What a bummer, I thought, to have to go grocery shopping on a scooter and take the bus.
Soon after she got on, a man toward the back of the bus -- maybe the same one who made the "full moon" comment -- started ranting. "Look at all those groceries. You can't use that to carry all your groceries on the bus. That's for wheelchairs only. I just carry my groceries in bags. You can't just use that thing because you aren't carrying your own groceries. Look at all those groceries! [She only had a modest amount.] You wouldn't be so fat if you walked home with your groceries and didn't eat so much! [She was moderately overweight, likely a result of not being able to walk easily, or, possibly, at all.]
At one point, the woman responded, in a tightly contolled voice "You're wrong. The lift isn't only for wheelchairs. It's called the Americans With Disabilities Act". I could tell what it cost her to keep her anger back. The man kept up his harangue.
At one point, the driver got on the microphone and said, "Tolerance, people", which had no affect on the man. Someone sitting near him, perhaps his friend, perhaps not, asked him gently to give it up, but he didn't.
I suppose the rest of us were afraid to tell him off. With occasional assaults and shootings on buses in recent years, few people are willing to step into tense situations. I'm sure the driver had the safety of all the passengers in mind. But it's discouraging that there wasn't a way to put this man off the bus and keep others safe at the same time.
I'm sure that woman, and others in wheelchairs or with other handicaps, run into this type of treatment a lot. How sad it is that the people who already have more challenges than the rest of us have to endure this kind of assault as well.
Do people act in such an uncivil manner because they're angry? Do people get so angry from being marginalized by society themselves? Or was this guy just a jerk for reasons unrelated to any socioeconomic factors?
Would any of this have happened on a suburban route? Am I elitist, a racist, or just afraid for not wanting this kind of commotion to be part of my daily life? Or is avoiding the #16 just another version of "white flight" that doesn't help anything? But would it help anything for me to continue taking this bus, feeling uncomfortable, getting angry myself?
And, having said all this, I'm well aware that the #16 is probably tame compared to a New York or London subway car. So I'm a sheltered whiner in that respect as well.
At any rate, the circumstance that has me riding that bus will end in a few weeks, and I'll be switching to a different, perhaps more sedate route that originates in a suburb. I can't say I'm sad about that.
What do you think?
