If you’ve read
some of my articles over the past few years you know that one of the bane of my
existence has been the Long Island Railroad in conjunction with the Manhattan
Transit Authority. I estimate I’ve spent roughly two and a half years on the
subway or railroad over my lifetime – and that both have taken at least another
year off it.
At its best,
and it’s never at its best, both the trains and the subways are an ill-combined
messed that work inefficiently with endless crowds, horrible schedules that
seem subject to change on the whims of the conductors and function with an
automated courtesy call for delays that every time I hear them I want to scream
in frustration. At its worst it is horrible, dreadfully maintained and
incredibly badly run idea that was good in theory and has never performed well in
execution. I honestly do believe the polar icecaps will melt before the MTA
manages to get the C line to work properly on a
weekend.
All of which is
to say I’m pretty sure much of the reason I’ve had to spend a good part of my
life in anger management and therapy is at least partially due to the subways,
buses and trains of New York City and the State of New York. It’s also why I’m
completely certain that what happened to be this evening had nothing to do with
the events of this week and everything to do with the LIRR being the LIRR.
To sum up
briefly I needed to catch a train at 5:30, the subways were not only delayed
but overcrowded, I managed to arrive at Penn Station with less than a minute to
spare, I got on to the train and there wasn’t a single seat free by the time I
got to the last car – at which point I noticed that one of my sodas had been leaking
for Lord knew how long and left a trail of liquid behind me and soaked by
dinner.
I blew up. No
that’s putting it mildly. I shouted a streaming of obscenities and the
passengers around me, at the conductor who approached me and his colleague who
came to see him at the next stop. Normally I have enough of a filter to calm
down. This time the perfect storm of the last half hour’s events – combined with
my everyday anger at the LIRR for every microaggression and more direct one I’ve
had to endure for more than thirty years – caused me to continue spewing. I
knew I was going to get kicked off the train. I didn’t care. That’s how angry I
was at the situation.
Now I’m sure
enough that some version of this happens on a daily basis on the trains every
day on the LIRR and ten times as often on the subway. I fear no short-term or
long-term repercussions for myself, particularly because I have experienced
enough personal growth that I got off the train without having to be escorted. And
I’ve had variations on some form of this incident over so much of my life
(though not one of this magnitude for several years) that I knew better of it.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m still infuriated and I expect I’ll need to go over this
in therapy over the next week. But I am also resigned enough to know that nothing
is going to change, not for me and not for the system.
That being said
I have gotten what may very well be a small insight into society that may at
least in part explain the results of Tuesday’s election. I admit the opinion is
my own and may very well be a shallow
reading of events. But considering that so much of this sight and indeed
columns are based on those kind of readings – and that I think the larger
points are true – I think its worth repeating for everyone’s well-being.
The one thing
that everyone in America agrees on – conservative,
liberal, red-state, blue state, political pundit, journalist – is that our society
is broken in a fundamental way. The details will change depending on who is
telling the story, the fundamentals do not. I don’t disagree with that concept.
Where my conclusions are vastly different is that while everyone has their own
explanation as to why everyone else in angry, not only do I think the cause of
the frustration is more universal than all of they would think but that everyone
has overlooked it.
I really do
believe that the average person – by which I mean someone who is not in the
political sphere, a billionaire, a celebrity, a journalist or an elitist, in
short most of us – has one fundamental concern in life. What we all want is our
life to be easier. Now the elite will frame this into large, existential
battles for the soul of America and politely speaking, all of them have their collective
heads up their asses if they think anyone cares about an ‘existential crisis’ when
there are so many everyday major and minor crises the rest of us have to deal
with. And to be sure they are overwhelming economic in nature.
But tied into
this is a desire to not have to deal with all of the microaggression and
roadblocks the makeup of our society has put in the way of just having a normal
life. I mean the long lines at grocery stores or waiting on hold for help with
the cable bill. I mean that our internet doesn’t work properly or that we have
to wait a week for a plumber to come to fix a leaky pipe. I mean that there are
insects in our home that resist bug spray. And I mean the fact that the trains
don’t run on time and are overcrowded.
And perhaps
just as frustrating as all of these is that fact that all of us have so little
recourse when inevitably things go wrong. This includes not even being able to
express our frustration and anger to those around us and being told (just as
infuriatingly) that this isn’t the right forum for our outrage or we can’t get
upset in public. There are so many microaggressions and larger ones in the
world we live in that we not only have no recourse about them but we’re not
even allowed to express how upset we are, in private or public. We just have to
let them simmer.
I mean, sure it
wasn’t productive for me to shout at the conductor or the passengers on the
train tonight but what recourse do I have? I could leave a note or an
email at the MTA’s office, I could call someone to report a complaint but it’s
not change anything in the moment and it’s not going to make a difference short-term,
long-term or at all. It would be the
equivalent of pushing the ‘WALK’ Button on a traffic light with the hope of it
changing it faster only with less chance of a result. We’re just told “this is how life is” and that’s
supposed to make us feel better somehow. It’s never worked for me and I don’t
imagine it works for anyone else.
And that does
link to our elections. So much of the talking points on both sides is that so
much of today’s politics is about ‘sending a message’ or ‘outrage instead of
policy’. All of this miss the point. So many of the ways we have to express
outrage in our society are either criminal, illegal or impractical and none of
them have even the potential to change something. The only time the people
really chance to send the American system a message is through the
ballot. It’s the only one that our society is willing to at least listen to.
And once that
is taken into consideration, one understands so much of the electorate not only
in recent years, but for the history of voting. Every two to four years,
Americans are allowed to as a body send our leaders a message. They get to tell
them their anger at the system or their confidence in it. They get to tell the
incumbent they like what they’re doing and if they don’t send them out. People
want to argue that for some people their vote counts more than it should or
that some people don’t take it seriously but the fact remains they are all
sending their message.
By that line of
reasoning the votes for Trump over the last eight years do have a certain logic
to it. No one pretends that the people who vote for him aren’t expressing their
outrage at the system; only the nature of the messenger and what that message
means. No one argues the system isn’t broken and no one pretends Trump is
anything other than a symptom of it. The problem is so much time and energy has
been spent on one side denying the validity of this outrage in favor of the other
side’s outrage. Both sides agree the system is broken; they just differ on
who broke it.
Similarly one
can also understand not just so much of the patterns of progressives over the
last year, not only towards Sanders but all the other leftist movements, as a
different kind of reaction to that broken system. Their frustration is, however,
more at the entire system rather than just one part of it. By voting for Jill
Stein they have sent their own kind of message and while I believe, like that
of Trump’s it is deeply flawed, I can’t dispute the validity of it either.
And while I don’t
understand why so many members of our society refuse to vote at all, they are
also, in their own way, sending a message. In a way, my experience with the
LIRR makes me sympathetic to them. To them the system is completely and utterly
messed up and it is beyond fixing. They see no gain in voicing their opinion
when they genuinely don’t think it will be heard. It is misguided but after so
much of the last quarter of a century, I am sympathetic to it.
That is why,
despite the fact that I am like millions of Americans and those around the
world, sickened and heartbroken by the results of Tuesday night I will
not and can’t dispute the system that allowed it. I have little doubt the
finger-pointing is going on between the Democratic party regulars right now.
But unlike the election in 2016 there is no dispute about an antiquated
electoral system and Russian interference by one side or that as in 2020 the
voting machines were hacked or that massive fraud happened on the other. The people
voted and the results are clear. To quote Aaron Sorkin (and the left will
loathe me for doing so) the process matters more than the results. Some will
say that if the results are not favorable we must discount the process as flawed.
The moment we start doing that, it is the end. We saw that play out on 2020 to
extreme circumstances; for the other side to do the same is just as dangerous,
particularly as they spent so much of the last year ensuring the fairness of
the process.
And I refuse,
despite all of its myriad flaws, to do
anything to repudiate the idea of the democracy as a system for government.
There is no other form of government on earth where the people are allowed to
express their outrage to the powers that be in a non-violent method and have it
accepted as doctrine. That is what happened Tuesday. I won’t pretend I don’t
have huge qualms about our country’s future over the next four years – I’m sure all of us do. But I will not and
shall not contemplate tearing down the system or process because of the result.
If indeed a vital part of our society is about dealing with the many minor
outrages that we must experience to survive our day-to-day lives, then such it
must continue to be with the results of an election.
I’m sure I will
be told in no uncertain terms by many on this site why I am wrong and how
misguided I am for believing that way. That’s acceptable to me. I’ve just spent
an entire article justifying your very right to do just that. Expressing
dissent is another right in our society that I am always in favor of, as well
as the right to respectfully disagree. Microaggressions and frustrations are
the world’s common tongue more than anything else and we do all want an easier
life. We just have to figure out how to get there.
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