How Something That Happened to Me Tonight Made Me Realize A Truth About Tuesday

Or How Riding Mass Transit Makes You Understand Why Democracy Works Better Than Most People Want to Admit

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 stream 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 insight 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.