The Lessons of Mass Transit

My bus was late today. No big deal, right? Buses are late all the time. This morning was different though. I walked up to the bus stop, and there was a man waiting for the bus. He was Hispanic, and had a number of prominent tattoos. He was also not wearing nearly enough against the cold Minnesota air. Conclusion: homeless or can’t afford jacket.

I’m generally a fairly anti-social person, and so I sidled up to the bus stop quietly, pulling out my bus card and looking at the ground. As I did so, he asked me the time. I checked and answered, thinking he would stop talking. Instead, he struck up a conversation: when does the bus come? Where are you going? Do you speak Spanish? Eventually he ended up telling me about his failed marriage and his time in prison. Part of me was desperate for the bus to show up already because I am not a happy person before my morning coffee, but the longer we talked, the more I realized that I was grateful for the chance to simply be with someone I wouldn’t normally be with.

To be perfectly honest with myself, I judged this man unsafe when I first saw him. I judged him as someone I did not want to converse with. Because of mass transit, I was forced to rethink that judgment. I was forced to be kind to someone, to listen to someone, to share myself with someone. It wasn’t a big interaction, 15 minutes at most. But I’m grateful for it. I heard an experience that I would never have heard otherwise. I gained a perspective that otherwise would have been lost to me. And these things are not small. I exist in a world of great privilege, with other individuals who are well-educated and well-off. I want to have the best understanding possible of those who don’t live in that world, and this moment was illuminating for me.

This person was real. He had stories. He was vulnerable. He just wanted someone to listen, and that was all I could offer him at that moment. I hope that it was enough.

This to me is the most important benefit of mass transit. It removes you from your insulated world and requires you to exist in the world with all the other individuals that exist around you. We live segregated lives. Oftentimes they are self-segregated, but we spend our lives around people who are like us. Particularly for those who are wealthy enough to buy cars, we rarely venture into places that are full of people of color or people in poverty. When we walk past them on the street, our eyes slide by them. We avoid.

When you are travelling with someone, you cannot avoid them. Oh sure, you can put in headphones or read a book, but you cannot stop seeing them. You can’t stop seeing the person who is talking to themself, or the mother who is hitting her child, or the people yelling at each other. You can’t stop seeing the gentle father, or the man who just wants to talk, or the kind person who gives up their seat for the elderly. These things happen and you experience them. You have conversations with these people and you begin to feel the shape of their lives barely forming beyond your ability to understand it. You are challenged by the actual existence, the actual humanity in front of you, of those people who are different from you.

You might be afraid. You might be disgusted. Or you might allow yourself to be challenged to imagine the rich complexity of how they live entirely apart from you. You cannot hide from the nasty things in life when they are invading all your senses: the poverty, the homelessness, the desperation in people’s eyes.

This, I think, is why so many people are opposed to using public transit. Yes, it can be a hassle, and yes, it can be slow, but in reality, many of us don’t want to mingle. We don’t want to get “dirty”. We are afraid of the lives we don’t want to see.

So as Thanksgiving looms, I am thankful that I am forced to see things. I am thankful that each day as I bus to work, in a job whose explicit purpose is to fight poverty, I see what I am fighting. I see the people behind that title. I am forced to accept those people in my space. I am thankful that they are there, that I can hear them and that in some places, they will not be ignored.

The Privileges of Space

One of the most common forms of privilege is the privilege of not having to think about or see something. The privilege of being able-bodied is often not having to think about how you’ll get somewhere. The privilege of being male is not having to think about whether your gender will affect how people treat you or respect you. I think we all know this, but it was driven home to me in a conversation I was having yesterday. I was talking to a friend about public transit, and he said that he didn’t like to see the crazies on public transit, or the moms trying to juggle a bunch of kids, or all the other sad things that you often see on a bus. I mentioned that those things don’t go away if you don’t see them, and his response was that he still didn’t want to see it.

 

There’s a huge amount of privilege in being able to say that and then hop in your car and drive yourself to work so you don’t have to notice things like poverty, mental illness, or disease around you. It is the amazing privilege of being able to choose your spaces, and put yourself only in situations that you feel comfortable in. I have always thought that space and the ability to own a space is one of the most important forms of power. Space is sacred for many people: even acting in certain ways in particular spaces is considered dirty, wrong, or sacrilegious. Someone who is “in your space” immediately feels threatened. And for those people who feel they can’t take up space, they often feel invisible or useless.

 

Being able to create and choose spaces is a huge privilege. These spaces allow you to choose what to see and what not to see. You can choose where to erect walls, who to let in. And often these spaces are created by how we get from place to place. Now more than ever we have all kinds of people mixed together in cities. But if you don’t have to take public transit, you don’t have to interact with those people one neighborhood over or see anyone from the district that isn’t so healthy. You can keep to those places that bar who can enter based on money or on status or on appearance. This is why I believe that everyone should try taking public transit for a while. No, there’s no way to enforce this and no particular real reason to, but it would be an intensely interesting social experiment to see what happens if you require an entire city to take public transit for a week or a month. See how people’s perspectives of each other and of their city change when they start to come into contact with all sorts of people.

 

As someone who used to take public transit regularly and now doesn’t, I know that I have become much more sensitive to difference. After spending 3 years at a heavily white, upper middle class, private college, I became far more aware of race and of difference, more afraid of it, more worried about it. I had never had that hyper-sensitivity, that innate sense that I would treat someone differently because they are different. I’m still not worried about taking public transit or being around people who are different from myself, but I have to be more conscious of it. I have to say to myself that this isn’t my space, it’s space for everyone and everyone deserves it. I wish others had the experience of simply being in space with people of difference. It changes your perspective. It changes what you view as normal. It changes how you see the world. I wish that there were more obligatory spaces that belonged to everyone. I see how privileged my friends are to NOT see the spaces where everyone mixes together and how afraid they are of those spaces and that makes me so sad. Those spaces are to be celebrated.