It's About Time

The other night I had a dream where I took a refreshing shower inside an oilcloth contraption on a city bus, but real buses don't have those, not that I've seen.

Here in Los Angeles we don't talk much about public transportation, and that's fine with us. We're all beautiful people here, far removed from the world, and while we're far too hip to ever voice anything unsavory or hurtful, we tackle the underclass by not saying anything about them at all.

We'd prefer not to even think of those who ride buses as the underclass, which is a hateful, derogatory term, but that's who they are here. It's easier to think about oil addiction when we're sealed up in our cars, away from the world we inhabit, than it is to consider those whom we punish by making them ride buses.

There are three or four types of people who ride buses, and none of them are anyone you'd ever want to be. There are the teens who lack the social graces to have friends old enough to drive them around, and they like to demonstrate their rudeness by yelling and treating the world as their oyster. They'll be fine once they get the old enough to buy a car.

Then there are the elderly and infirmed. These are people we refuse to think about except in the abstract ("build more ramps!"), and we're fine with them being on buses since it keeps them out of our way. There's a smaller group of students, kids in their twenties, and others forced to take the bus for a short time, and they're typically nervous when they ride. Most times, they lock themselves into the chosen and directable world of their iPods, and act as if they aren't where they are.

Mostly, though, the buses are full of those people society has left behind. They struggle, like we all do, but are invisible to those of us who've made it. I see them every day, clutching plastic bags of valuable possessions or burdened with the results of meager shopping trips, and it's obvious they never get invited to any of the better parties.

While we depend on these people to raise our children and clean our homes, to serve as security guards and fulfill our demands when it comes to selling or packaging the consumer goods we insist on having, these people, not even worthy of having a car, are beneath us. I'm not sure we want them to suffer, to be punished for not being up to our standards, but that's what we do.

Since we can't, really, kill them and get them off our planet, we take their next most precious resource, their time. Riding the buses is a true example of why government doesn't work, it's a "public service." Those not good enough to soar with the eagles of society are given the opportunity to remain at the end of the pack, where the predators can more easily pick them off, by an inefficient, choiceless system.

It's a matter, as I see it, of salvaging our guilt. We want everyone to be able to get around in theory, just as long as they don't need to show up in our world. The fact that the means we provide them to reach the destinations where we want them to be wastes hours of their time isn't our concern, because our lives are already too filled. We're in a hurry to succeed, but they're so unimportant that we don't mind at all imposing on them wasteful hours.

In fact, we don't even think about it. If they can't pay with the coin of the realm, they'll pay with the hours of their lives, but that's what they deserve. With any luck it will hurt enough that they'll learn the error of their ways, buy a car, and become a fully-vested citizen.