The MUNI Chronicles: making me grateful
i’ll just come out and say it: i tend to be judgemental. i know that i try to hold people up to *my* standards, without taking into account their lives and what they may have been through. I expect them to want to look, act, and dress similarly to the way i would want to look, act, and dress. oh, and i would also brand myself as “pretty tolerant.” but isn’t that kind of the way of things today? “tolerance” is such a buzz-word, but we really only mean that as long as people fit inside *our* boundaries, we can tolerate them. so this discrepancy is something i’m constantly slapping myself on the wrist for. i *want* to be truly tolerant. i *want* to understand people instead of judging them.
i say all this to say that i’m especially at my judging finest when i ride the bus. a whooooole bunch of people ride public transit in this city. but when i see a lot of them, the spoiled brat inside me wants to look down on them, to judge them, and be appalled by them. that’s kind of the premise of the whole “MUNI Chronicles” thing - telling the stories about ridiculous people (and sometimes events) on public transit.
so this one’s a little bit different. it actually happened to me months ago, but i have been meaning to write about it. i was on one of the more ghetto busses (there’s the spoiled brat i was talking about), going home, when a blind man got on with his seeing eye dog. he was fairly young, and the man across from him recognized him and began talking to him. apparently they’d been in a job training class together at the community college. they were talking about where they worked now (both in relatively entry-level positions - a clerk or assistant or something along those lines) and what they’d been up to since the class.
the blind guy started to tell the other guy about the trouble he was having getting government assistance for his rent and medication - all the hoops he’d had to jump through with the offices, HMO’s, etc. but he wasn’t bitching or complaining. normally when i hear people talk about how the government’s not taking good enough care of them, i immediately think - make something of yourself, stop living off my dime, and be accountable for yourself like the rest of us. but this guy’s story actually brought tears to my eyes. from the few minutes i spent listening to him, he seemed like he was doing everything right. and here was somebody the government *should* be helping, and instead it was just making life that much more difficult for him.
that day on the bus, i didn’t come away angry with the traffic, or frustrated with other people. i came away with the feeling that i have so much more than i will ever truly be able to appreciate.