A crazy sad madcap urban bus ride vignette
My bus ride this morning was epic bad, the kind that makes me not wanna ride it again, LOL…well, lol but not LOL.
It’s not funny. No. Sad, yes. Madcap, maddening, tragic, stupid, bonkers Seattle.
Was insane!
Yes, I’m with the progressive PC Woke crowd, and it’s all gone too darn far, way too far, dammit!, when chaos, anarchy, and disease take over, fear dominates, and citizens are cowed into submission, apathy, and violence.
Apparently the buses bombing straight up and down Aurora pick up the worse of the worse – about 75% if not more of the riders seem homeless. Most appear to have bad mental health, drug & alcohol problems. One old, White man with a shaggy beard kept shuffling around with his pants down around his ankles and no underwear – he tried to hold them up by hand but gave up as the bus lurched around traffic – and tried to hand folks a one-dollar bill. No one took it. Why? Cuz the money looked like he’d wiped his ass with it! He shuggled forward towards the bus driver and offered her a nasty looking dollar bill, too. He seemed confused and perhaps wanted to somehow pay someone for for his ride on the metro bus. She waved him away. Told him to go sit down and pull his pants up. He turned around looking confused with his britches still down with the money still in hand. He left a wad of bills on his bus seat along with folded pieces of notebook paper, but no one dared grab such nasty looking money or attempted to sit down on the same two-person seat. No way! And there were preteen kids on the bus with big eyes! A family of tourists! God! And the old fellow kept babbling really loud in a obnoxious way – except his babble actually RHYMED in a cute way that also grated on yer nerves.
Loud music boomed from inconsiderate, jerkbrained, dumbass kids piled in the back of the bus. Sorry about the insults. No, I’m not. Sick and tired of how permissive and apathetic and stupid and terrified we’ve all become. And the bus driver, a big, boxy Black woman in large, black eyeglasses was angry as a riled-up hornet all shook up in a jar. Yes, she was so pissed off. She kept yelling at young teen rowdies in the back to turn their music down. When they ignored her as she weaved our huge, bouncing, shuddering red and yellow express bus thru torrents of traffic, she slowed down and threatened to call the damn police on them. The family of tourists stared straight ahead with the blank aplomb of Vulcans on Star Trek.
The no-more-bullshit-not-gonna-take-no-more-stupid-shit-anymore bus driver wouldn’t stop for any more wheelchair people as the disabled section aboard was already crowded with wheelchairs. The wheelchair people would wave frantically from the sidewalks anyway as we careened on by as the bus driver shook her head. “Sorry.” She was so mad, mad at kinda everything everyone everywhere, that all she could do was drive. And she drove, too. Kept on driving. A few times I thought she wouldn’t even stop to let any of us off. Then I’d really be late for work. But she stopped. Anytime someone pulled the stop cord, she’d slowed down and pull over, engines running, and opened the doors for a bit. One wheelchair user would scoot and roll off and another one got on, took their place, and had to be tethered up in the same safety harness.
Almost wanted to cry, and at the same time I was already starting to run late getting to work because there were so many wheelchair users needing to ride the bus. Which was great, great for wheelchair users to have mass transit buses with movable lift platforms available to assist them. Doing so, however, took a few minutes for each person. The system is amazing in a way, but is certainly not perfect. Needs more techno-efficiency.
Those with movement challenges are not a problem, tho. The problem, however, is the chronic acute lack of affordable housing and health care especially for masses of poor, mentally diseased, and traumatized human beings. It’s systemic. And activists demonizing each other in futile, enraged arguments over capitalism versus socialism fail to offer pragmatic solutions for the 21st Century. They’re so stuck in the past all they can see is each other’s blood.
What happened to our country that it led to this? Well, the homeless & mental health problems began point on with Ronald Reagan’s presidency when he shut down the mental institutions – to save $$$ for the military. The Cold War was heating up once again. At the time many thought doing so to be a good idea as horror stories of abuse, torture, and rape inside those institutions were widespread. The patients, however, ended out on the streets. Their families didn’t have the skills, the money, or the spacetime to fully address this new flood of people head-on. Decades later, homelessness, mental illness, and addictions are out of control. Our messy situation is sad, tragic, scary, and infuriating. What do we do now, really?
William Dudley Bass
Friday 26 August 2022
Friday 28 July 2023
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
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