The Mandelbear's Reading

After transgym yoga, I wait for a bus where a few young men -- late teens? early 20s? -- also wait. They mess around just enough that I'm always worried the bus won't stop for us at all: for example, today they threw a full water bottle at the half-open window of a car that clearly had a friend of theirs in it (it missed) right before the bus pulled up.

But other than "will this once-an-hour bus stop for me," I've never given them much thought.

Until this time: one of them walked the few steps over towards me and said "Hey, how old are you?"

I had my headphones in (I'm reading The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall, which was sold to me as "transmasc Watson, but I'm finding the Sherlock-analogue to be too BBC-Sherlock for my tastes, so I'm not sure but I'm trying to reserve judgement so far) so I thought I hadn't heard him properly at first. I stopped the audiobook and said "what?" but he repeated the same thing.

I laughed and said "Why do you want to know?"

He changed tack, asking if I was on any social media, and I chuckled a little again and said I'm sorry, I'm really not on social media. He seemed to struggle a bit with this, as I expected. I figured the chances were good that he and I had never overlapped in our social media presences -- since I deactivated my Facebook a couple months ago, after not having used it for anything but messaging for the previous year, I won't be on anything he's even heard of.

Then he asked "Are you single?" and I really started to wonder if I was being pranked, or if he'd lost a bet with his mates, or something.

I couldn't limit myself to gentle chuckles this time. I said no, I'm not.

"You're not," he said, and he'd repeated most of my answers back to me but something made this one sound a little more incredulous than would have been polite. Which also made me laugh more.

He had one more question for me: "What's your gender?" It wasn't asked in a transphobic way, it felt like an honest question. Yes I have a beard and all, and I was wearing a binder, but I was dressed for the gym so it was underneath a tank top that's cut low enough that you can see, well, cleavage. So I really didn't mind the answer; I was giving off very non-binary vibes (which I'm not, I just have given up appeasing norms if the other option is to overheat less). I was kind of charmed that this was his fourth -- and last it turned out. It didn't seem like the answer would be a dealbreaker anyway. Again, my answer seemed to require some processing, but no more so than the previous two.

He then asked again "And you're not on any social media?" I did, for the briefest moment, consider telling him that I had a blog, but it seemed cruel to baffle this young man any further.

About then the bus arrived. I was left charmed by what might sound from the words we exchanged more threatening, but it really wasn't. I had a smile on my face and the unspoken wish that I hope that young dude has a good weekend.

The bus ride home is short, but it was long enough for me to watch another adorable scene play out: there were two buggies in the buggy/wheelchair spaces on the bus, one with a toddler who was not in her buggy by the time I got on the bus, and one with a smaller baby (who I couldn't really see, as the buggy was facing the wrong way). The toddler was holding a stuffed-toy sheep which she wanted to show to the baby. She was standing on her wobbly legs as the bus started and stopped, and stretching out her arm as far as she could towards the buggy. The baby's grownup smiled but tried to discourage this, saying the baby "will just chew on it, she chews on everything, and you don't want that, do you?" The toddler was not to be dissuaded, though. Eventually she and her own grownup settled on "let's just show the sheep to the baby, not let her have it. So the toddler bravely made her way across the aisle -- the baby's hand, outstretched toward the sheep, was the only part of the baby that I saw on this whole trip -- and huddled under the cover of the baby's buggy so they could both delight in the soft sheep toy.

I watched this and thought about how many little moments of life are shared on the bus or at the bus stop, or tram, or train, or whatever. It made me think about something I read recently:

We're staying in a temporary place while work is being done on our apartment, and we rented a car to move into a short-term rental. My wife, a New York native, doesn't drive, so when we travel or do stuff like this it's my responsibility. And just the experience of loading up a car with the items we need for a month and driving a few blocks south and east to deposit them in the rental was almost enough to ruin my whole day. And I thought about people who do this every day, voluntarily! The joy of the open road is the sales pitch, but the reality is circling the block in central Brooklyn looking for a quasi-legal parking space, knowing the whole time that if you were close enough friends with a cop you could just pull up on the sidewalk.

What struck me is how quickly and easily you become a sociopath, even a borderline eugenicist, behind the wheel; everyone else is the problem, there are too many people here, this would all be fine if it weren't for all these OTHER people, etc. And then you connect that to all other politics, and it unlocks so much. People don’t want more neighbors because of traffic. Not wanting more neighbors is a short trip to some really dark beliefs. And it's literally just a mood tied to driving. I've never walked to the park and been upset at how many other people decided to walk to the park that day! Regularly driving in American cities is the fastest route to Malthusian thinking and it's entirely about traffic and parking.

I'm not even sure I agree, but the idea that car-culture, motornormativity, leads pretty directly to resentment and seeing one's neighbors as competition for space or as obstacles does feed into a lot of USian stereotypes about individualism -- and British ones too; "there is no such thing as a society" indeed!

I'm not saying everything about sharing space so closely with other people is good -- I imagine that the well-dressed lady who had me, a sweatmonster, sit next to her on the bus might have had less positive things to say about the experience of being in such proximity! and of course far worse things happen on public transport -- but I do think it's good that we share it. Apart from everything else that repels me about the idea of autonomous cars, I want other people to be in the same situation I am: to have a shared goal of getting from A to B. It's not something I'm putting up with, it's a feature. Because for all I've been harassed or uneasy or extra aware of my vulnerabilities at bus stops and so on, I've also been aware that most people are good, people will help if they can. We all do better when we all do better, as my political hero Paul Wellstone said.

I learned the term subsidarity for this from Fred Clark, a USian progressive Christian who like me is old enough to still blog. He's talked about it a lot; I found a good description of it here:

My favorite description of subsidiarity — description, not definition — is the bit from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Everyone has a role to play in everything. All are responsible for all. Our roles and responsibilities differ — they may be direct or indirect, sometimes several steps removed. But everything is connected. If I abdicate my direct responsibilities, I will end up placing a heavier burden on those with indirect responsibilities — forcing them to play a more direct role. If I neglect my indirect responsibilities, I will end up placing a heavier burden on those who bear a more direct responsibility — possibly causing them to fall under the weight of it. This mutuality is, as King said, inescapable. Others affect me and I affect others, inescapably.