Public Transit in the City of Light

Celebrate Diversity by riding public transit. Wrap your mouth around the white guilt spigot and suck back some of the feel good sap of political correctness. Gosh darn, the news is sticky with news about public transit here in the City of Light. Take your pick: the gunman they cannot catch, the rush hour without a rush, or just the general background theme of soon come, soon come. Our beloved leftists have strangled the road net, and now they are choking transit. Like an aging whore faced with a phallus of larger volume than her already stretched throat can handle, the system gurgles to a halt. Take a journey with me, Fenris Badwulf, into the future using the Global Warming science of conjecture into Public Transit in the City of Light:

My friend, Jigturd, is looking for a job. I met Jigturd at a Violence Awareness Seminar given at the local public library. We kept in touch: he does some odd jobs for my contracting company (for cash, to spite both the confiscators of income and the old fogeys of the trades unions). Jigturd was on the Mainline that tragic day. He was looking for a job, but found something else. Unlike Jigturd, Kaligumbo has a job. She works for white folks of privilege in the Yonge and Eglinton area of the City of Light. She works for cash, to keep her eligibility for welfare and college active. She too was riding public transit on that tragic day. When she looked up from her Ferminist survey of Rape, she was shocked out of her comfortable world. Lastly, there was Jack, the apprentice plumber. Jack was white, and was learning about white privilege first hand from his trade school instructors at Downtown College. Only last week his iPod had been taken as reparations for slavery. Today, he discovered that his grade in Plumbing Theory had been Normalled down from A to C so that victims of colonialism could be Normaled up from F to B. Jack takes the last car of the subway, because the exit at his stop is closest to the doors. The less time Jack spends on a subway platform, the better.

Looking for a job means standing and looking out the front of the train. For Kaligumbo, job improvement means reading assigned texts on the train. For Jack, he neither looks nor reads: instead he contemplates his white peers whose marks A through D were all Normalled to a progressive C; good for the D's, not good for the A's and B's. Jigturd rides the train mornings, looking for a job. This is his third week of diligent job searching. Kaligumbo has read several chapters of her text read thanks to public transit. As for Jack, he wonders if he should bother to continue to waste his time studying when a passing C is carved in the stone of his academic future.

The Tragic Day happened. No media will report on the actual why and how after the twenty four hour news cycle has cycled by. The media reports the ambulances waiting outside the subway entrances; they chat with the waiting Emergency Persons. The media shows file footage of some other station during a different season. The media ties in the incident to Global Warming, the need for Tax Increases, and some big, hunky Firepersons whose manliness appeals to the men who like to admire men. Actually, the why is simple: an employment equity hire in the maintenance shop shoved the wire labelled 'A' under the screw marked 'B'. Those familiar with fail safe systems know that subway doors cannot open until the train has stopped moving (sensor to detect wheel motion), and until the train operator has pressed the 'open door' button. Unless wire 'A' is under screw 'B'. Then the doors open, all of them, while the train is in motion (on both sides, too), when an obese (oppressed by the legacy of colonialism in Africa) patron leans, placing way too many kilograms of force perpendicular to the plane of the door. A sensor (the 'is the door closed?' sensor) gapped, and the signal triggered an 'open all doors' condition, not a 'trouble' signal in the cab; all thanks to wire 'A' under screw 'B'.

The obese person did not even have time to scream as the wind steam sucked them out into the subway tunnel through the now open door. Whether the obese person was a boy or a girl, I could not tell. Jigturd just saw someone dressed in loud clashing colors disappear into the black (er, evil white-dark) maw of the tunnel. There was no cry, no gender specific wail for government intervention. Now, after the unfortunate was drawn into the tunnel and ripped apart by the lever, wedge and cantilever beam forces invented by the dead white male Newton, only a diligent coroner could identify the gender of the assorted packages of guts deposited along the kilometers of track.

For Kaligumbo, the unexpected sounds of screaming and the slap-splash-slosh of a human liver impacting on the inner door partition close to her head, brought to her mind the immediate thought that someone was being raped. She was in the middle of the self-quiz at the end of the chapter Rape is All Around Us. Splattered human liver, sliding slowly down the see through plastic, looks a lot like food liver sliding slowly down a sheet of see through plastic. Across from the open door where the liver was sucked in, another person of color pushed his riding companion towards the open door. If asked, he would say it was 'a joke'. Kaligumbo saw it all: The N-person pushing the other N-person into the open space. The pushed, in the spirit of 'the joke', grabbed the joker and they were both devoured by the three racist laws of motion. Neither head survived, being transformed into a gore lacquer streak some two hundred meters long. At least their trunks survived: both have male genitalia (one of the coroner's many assistants being a connoisseur of male genitalia, pictures have surfaced on one of the many other gendered autopsy sites; the video is behind a pay wall). As to the question of if the remaining bits (four hands, three forearms, and two elbows) were sorted into the matching coffins. For Kaligumbo, her first reaction was rape. After a few seconds of death and dismemberment, she clued into reality and realized the train was traveling at speed with all the doors open; and people were getting drawn outside (or pushed).

For Jack, he could hear the screams, then saw the smears along the subway walls as the train, never braking until its blood and gore streaked sides glided into the next station. Diversity erupted along the train, as individuals broke down along community lines, expecting attack from tribal, clan, religious, or ethnic enemies. Possessions were lost, mostly stolen by those who steal in response to the legacy of colonialism in Africa. Some fights broke out, as those who beat up colonial oppressors in response to the legacy of colonialism in Africa lashed out, and made reparations confiscations of consumer goods. Jack watched one fight: three on one. Whitey was wedged into a seat and was determined to stay there and not get thrown out of the moving train as reparation for slavery. As for his three attackers, one had his ankle broken when a knapsack (outside the tunnel) snagged his stainless, store tagged, construction boots, and pulled his ankle out of the socket.

Someone, thank any God but Christ, pulled the panic strip. The driver had no thought about thinking about what was going on. There were no alert lights on his command console. Until the panic strip light went on. But by then the train was stopped in the station. People on the platform side ran onto the platform. People on the tunnel side jumped into the tunnel. Seven managed to jump, or fall, onto the live third rail. They died. They caught on fire, too. It filled the place with smoke, and there was a powerful bad smell. The people after number eight who jumped out through the tunnel side of the subway cars (the doors along the entire train on both sides) were not electrocuted. They just broke their bones, or skinned their knees, or otherwise were injured sufficient to claim lifetime pensions from the pyramid of state: city, province, and federal.

Jigturd scooped a laptop, and was pleased with himself as he entered onto the street. Kaligumbo still held her textbook and followed Jigturd (whom she does not know) up to the surface and went for a coffee. Jack went for coffee, too. Jigturd and Kaligumbo had sufficient presence of mind to alert their homies, er, relatives, sufficient that a few were able to show up and claim they were on the train too, and now eligible for life time pensions. Jack, wise to the Normalling effect, was happy to have escaped alive, and content with the knowledge that even if all around him would get pensions for their emotionally suffering, he would not. Jack went to school (this was his stop, anyway) and found that class was cancelled; so he spent the afternoon talking to his favorite instructor about the physics of copper. Jigturd was able to avoid looking for work for a month thanks to the sob story he told his Momma; and the possibility of a lifetime pension made him more valuable: his Daddy actually sent him a post card from prison. Kaligumbo used her experiences to puff up her essay on rape. She got an A.

Public Transit in the City of Light. This would never happen, of course. Wire 'A' is always under screw 'A'. Right, er, left?

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this.