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I love big cities and I especially love mass transit and commuter rail systems.
I suspect that much of it stems from the fact that I grew up in a big city (Detroit) that did not (and still doesn’t, really) have anything like the NYC subway system or the el in Chicago or the Metro in DC or the T in Boston.
So I’ve been digesting the multitude of takes about the subway shooting in Brooklyn this past Tuesday and what it signifies.
Here’s my favorite, to this point.
Zach Helfand/The New Yorker
Nobody doubted the ease of committing any crimes in any subways. The list of recent track-shovings, muggings, and hate crimes caused by untreated mental illness is long and troubling. The wonder is that we’re able to keep a subway running at all. We pack people of all ages, sizes, dispositions, tax brackets, and crankiness levels into a metal can in a hole in the ground, and send them off, bound only by a nebulous social contract. We doff our backpacks, tuck in our feet, and even, occasionally, unspread our legs. We bear the sweaty armpit at nose level, the errant elbow. There should be no eating of stinky food, no clipping of fingernails, no hogging the pole. No eye contact. Passengers keep to themselves. They have been known to ignore, for instance, the presence of sharks (dead) and snakes (live), so long as the sharks and snakes also ignore them. When violations occur, they can feel unusually disturbing. Subway disasters, as opposed to, say, car crashes, traumatize because they remind us of the fragility of this deal. What unsettled people about the alleged shooter’s videos was that he seemed deeply unbalanced and filled with hate—and not unlike the recent array of subway menaces that have invoked the old Fear City days: he knew the rules, and he declared them broken.
People who study this kind of thing call the subway social compact “civil inattention.” We build personal bubbles to survive in the throng. The social psychologist Stanley Milgram once sent his graduate students into the subway with the task of asking strangers to give up their seats. The results—most of the strangers acquiesced—were less shocking than the process: the students found the asking to be torturous. Some nearly vomited. One of the students reflected later, “That study showed how much the rules are saving us from chaos.” But every day presents its own challenges: the escalating argument, the mother being rough with her kid, the man breathing too close. Where does bubble end and community begin?
Yeah, you can find crime on the subway; plenty of it. You can also find a marketplace, a concert hall, and even, occasionally, a sex club (if that’s your thing).
I’ve always enjoyed both the sheer randomness of catching the subway and how much of a rut it can become; seeing some of the same faces on the same routes doing the same things every morning. It’s one of the things I dearly missed about being on COVID lockdown in 2020; I didn’t catch the el for almost a year.
I can’t imagine city life without the subway, in spite of the crime and the drama.
Or maybe...because of it?
Comments below the fold.
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From thesphynx:
Simple Mind provides this excellent summing-up of Trump's approach to the presidency in Aldous J Pennyfarthing’s post on Trump’s inability to criticize Putin.
From nancyjones:
This comment by Falcon Hawke, posted in Hunter’s Ukraine update last night, is dead on.
Highlighted by BillInMi:
This comment by stevemb in Kerry Eleveld’s post on how Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Oz is causing contention among Pennsylvania Republicans.
Highlighted by cminus:
This comment by Alexy Vlasenko in kos’ Ukraine update this morning.
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