Oh, The Subway's Flooding

Hi. Remember LiveJournal? No, because you’re either too young or too old for an internet 1.0 blogging platform that we all used to share our private feelings with our high school friends / the whole world? That point in time was probably the peak of social media. Not addictive, very few bells and whistles, and almost no Russian misinformation campaigns to attempt to sway elections.

You would go out with your friends, then go home, then write a blog that simultaneously processed your feelings about how it went AND performatively attempted to shape those narratives with the friends you knew would be reading. The girl that you had a crush on had to bail early because her parents called her, and you would post the exact Dashboard Confessional lyrics to address your deep deep sadness.

But now, we have… this… and from time to time I will grab it by the steering wheel and drive it into LiveJournal territory.

So let’s talk about mass transit.

Tonight, all over the local and for some reason national news, stories poured in (medium pun intended?) about the NYC rainstorms and subsequent floods. It happens a lot during heavy rain, partially because Manhattan is pretty flat and — oh yeah — also because there are huge open grates in the sidewalk that lead directly to subway platforms. Yes, when you see those viral videos of a waterfall landing on a 4 train… that is not mystery water, it’s just using the giant opening in the ground.

Obviously when this happens, some of the 100-year-old equipment that keeps the subway running breaks down. You think you’re mad the subway’s delayed, just ask the guy in WW2 who missed out on kissing that nurse in Times Square! Same train infrastructure!

But huge rainstorms are essentially acts of God. (Except for the very large part where they’re acts of man destroying the climate God provided to us in what angels are calling “one of His worst decisions.”) What destroyed my day traveling around the city was much earlier in the day — a power outage.

The power was out at West 4th Street, a critical junction of Manhattan transit that connects an incredible amount of people going an incredible amount of different places. I know a big chunk of subscribers don’t live in NYC (congrats on the quiet nights / condolences on the pizza) so I’ll take a minute to dig into some New Yorky (Yorkey?) details. In less than five minutes, you can walk from the West 4th stop to:

• The Comedy Cellar, one of the world’s most famous comedy clubs

• The Stonewall Inn, a bedrock location for LGBTQ civil rights

• Washington Square Park, a park with a big cool arch like Paris has¹

• An old-school pasta place that will cut it fresh for you

• NYU’s Catholic church, big blue front door you can’t miss

So when that train station goes down… stuff gets real jacked up everywhere. Including where I live, which is quite a few miles and melanin shades away from the Village. When I strolled out the door this morning with my plucky nepo-child, I scanned my phone and saw there were some mild delays on the train. Shrug! Not a huge deal. We walked to the subway and I told my kid, “We’ll be fine, we can take the A, B, C, or D. As long as one of those is running, no problem.”

Bad. And I knew it was bad because the MTA worker in the train info booth was telling everyone that they should leave the station and that the next train line over — two avenues over — “knew they were coming.”

Now, instead of saving the moral / thesis / lesson for the end like a priest trying to white-knuckle through a homily at a parish he’s visiting, I’ll put it here.

Big cities, big coastal blue cities, have huge public transit. It is one of the many examples of using tax money to create large publicly accessible goods. And when those things break, the kind of conservative gas-huffers that think that 10pm counts as late night use it as an example of the failure of liberalism or leftism or Democratism or whatever label most chuffs.

I’ve lived in three of the biggest American cities in my life: New York, Chicago, and L.A. Two of them had solid transit, one did not. I’ve also lived in a lot of small towns, where you had to drive 45 minutes to eat something you didn’t cook yourself, or where you had to keep your groceries in a cooler so they didn’t spoil between the store and home. None of those had transit, and they all relied on cars. And I love cars, mostly because I love driving. In high school I lived in a small town and my friends didn’t, and I drove a 75-mile roundtrip to hang out. Every. Single. Day.

All that to say that I accept and endure and understand the frustrations with something like “a way to get around that the city has set up instead of me.” Would it be easier to just drive home from the movie theater with my kid instead of hopping several trains and waiting for packed bus as backup? Sure! Would it be a huge pain in the ass to make sure I had the booster seat set up, navigate traffic to the theater, find a place to park (and pay for it), drive home, find another place to park that’s hopefully not too far a walk from my apartment, go home? Sure!

This is how I always see this play out.

• RED: Liberals want to run America? Look at their cities! The train’s wet!

• BLUE: Actually cars are bad and trains are good, also you guys are doing climate change which is why this is happening!

And I in no way want to create some kind of “third way” response here, because I am very clearly an ideologue who will rally with whoever is doing the things I think are moral and Right and Just, and I just doooooon’t see that being “the ones trying to re-segregate schools” any point in my lifetime.

But I think there’s a better, more normal, and more honest response that should be coming from the BLUE crew in situations like this. This ties very much into an OMGreg Cardinal Rule, which is Talk Normal. So maybe… this.

• Yeah dude it sucks when your train is late, same way it sucks you sit in traffic both ways to work. But for three bucks I can go 15 miles on a clear path and pretend to read while I look at my phone.

• Yeah, it’s an incredible amount of work to maintain the largest metro system with the most annual riders outside of Asia. Who’s staying in the subway arms race with China? NYC, baby! What are you doing to keep America on top? Putting in a three-stop light rail? light work miss me bro

• Things that are big break all the time. That’s why big things have big budgets and staff… to keep the things running. Because anything at that scale is gonna break down on the regular. The subway. Rides at Disneyland. The FBI when it’s looking for Epstein files.

When people in bad faith attack you, it should behoove you to tell them to [insert favorite lewd insult here]. “The NIH loses money!” “Those starving kids were actually dying for a second, different reason!” “Sanctuary cities are hellholes!”

I know that for so much of your life, you were taught to hear something wrong and charitably bring the person into the informed light of truth.

Bitch, those days are gone. These people do not (I’ll do this phonetically) cay-uh-urrrrrr about what’s true or good or consistent with their other positions. They care about you being mad and you losing. And you will waste irreplaceable moments of your life if you engage them with the self-delusion they’re in it to find common ground. They are Agent Smith. You are Neo.

1  There’s also a big arch in Madrid and I never hear anyone talk about it. Justice for Arco de la Victoria!