January 30, 2023

Keep Riding the Streetcar

To live in a city at all is to sign up for a complicated project.

I think that living anywhere among others is a complicated project, but in a city there are no grounds to believe otherwise, no opportunity to bury one’s head in the sand about how difficult (and worth striving for) is a functioning society.

Bad things happen everywhere, they really do, and the only difference is that, in a city, when they happen, nobody says that they never thought a thing like that could happen in a place like this.

Which, of course, doesn’t make it any easier when bad things happen, except maybe a little bit, that I’ll never get quoted on a local newscast spouting that cliche.

But otherwise, it’s hard. It’s hard when scary and violent things occur in your little world, no matter where that little world is. My daughter takes public transit to school every day. I take transit almost everywhere that I don’t walk to. Transit is what makes a city work, it isn’t a city without it, and I’ve so had enough of Brenda from Whitby in the Comments explaining why she doesn’t take the TTC anymore because of escalating crime—but maybe it’s also because she lives an hour away and has no idea what she’s talking about?

The rest of us, however, don’t have a choice in the matter, and even if we did, we might take transit anyway, because if you take transit often you already know that most of the time it’s fine. That millions of people ride transit everyday without incident, and I’m not saying the system could not use improvements, but it certainly doesn’t need riders abandoning it in droves.

I keep thinking about those awful trucks one year ago that shut down our nation’s capital, the violence, the noise, the fury, the anger, and how, in some ways, the increased more explicit violence we’re seeing everywhere is part of that same spectrum, people empowered by rage and delusion, stoking fear and division.

I’ll keep riding the streetcar. Not just because I have to, but because it’s also the answer, the way it connects us all, to everywhere and everything, makes it impossible to imagine that answers to the challenges before us are ever easy or obvious.