I take the bus to work every day.
No. Strike that. I walk to the Metro station, then take the Metro to the bus stop, then take the bus to work everyday. Takes about an hour or so. Gets me walking two miles a day (one mile each way), and gives me room to breathe. To meditate. To read. To think. And sometimes to talk to myself.
The early morning bus is pretty much empty.
The bus home though, is another story. Full of a combination of adults going to or coming back home from work, and kids coming from school.
And the kids? Loud as all get out. That's what they do, right?
But there are two problems here.
The first problem is that there are folks on the bus who aren't really trying to hear kids while they're coming home from, or going to work. They want to be able to sit with their thoughts and either get ready for battle, or decompress FROM battle.
The second problem is that depending on the subject matter, the kids may be divulging information they shouldn't really be divulging.
Both these problems are political problems and get to the heart of the public/private distinction in political theory.
And I've tackled the first problem on the bus before.
It's the second problem I tackled yesterday.
I'm sitting at the back of the bus with four loud kids. As I try to focus on getting home and getting my head right, they begin (loudly) asking each other questions about their personal sexual histories. I can't NOT hear them (my IPod wasn't charged). I don't want to be rude so I spend most of the bus right NOT not hearing them and trying to figure out how to intervene.
Finally, I do. I tell one of the students that one of the reasons it's important to be quiet on the bus is that you don't want the PUBLIC to know your PRIVATE business. Because you don't know how they might use it for one, and because some information is best shared only with friends. I'd taken so long because I was worried that I'd somehow offend them and the conversation would end up all wrong. But it didn't. The young lady who was, in hindsight, divulging the most understood EXACTLY what I was talking about. On the other hand another young lady didn't care. It didn't matter to her that "her business was out there."
Now again, the public/private distinction is one of the core distinctions in political theory and in democratic theory. Historically the public sphere was the sphere in which (propertied) men came together to talk about the common good, while the private sphere was the sphere in which (enslaved) men and women (in general) were "allowed" to speak. And we see this in black political thought–think Malcolm X and his ideas on black "family business". For these kids there really is no distinction. The public and the private neatly blend together.
The reason I intervened was because I think there are stakes here. That is to say, it matters that those kids are putting their business out there. They don't know who we are, they don't know how we might use that information.
In hindsight though another way to think about what they're doing is as a subversion of the public/private distinction. If kids are always supposed to be seen but not heard, and black kids are not even really supposed to be SEEN (think the various ways black youth are policed), and kids believe this dynamic to be wrong one way to resist or rebell is simply to ignore the distinction. To put their stuff out there.
The quick (adult) response to this is: "how can they get a job that way"?
To which I reply "they aren't getting jobs ANYWAY."
I think it is good that you took the time to say something to them. It was a risk for you, and for the one girl to actually listen to this old man was a risk too. I think sometimes kids do these things really begging some response, any response. Someone gives an ish. Might not change anything but you also might have given her something she (or maybe other eavesdroppers) may always remember. Worth it IMO
Now again, the public/private distinction is one of the core
distinctions in political theory and in democratic theory. Historically
the public sphere was the sphere in which (propertied) men came together
to talk about the common good, while the private sphere was the sphere
in which (enslaved) men and women (in general) were “allowed” to speak.
And we see this in black political thought–think Malcolm X and his ideas
on black “family business”. For these kids there really is no
distinction. The public and the private neatly blend together.
You skipped something fairly significant in the above “contextualization”?
When I was growing up, I wouldn’t conscience behaving in public in any manner, form, or fashion that would bring disgrace to my parents. You wouldn’t have either. Has nothing to do with “propertied” men, had everything to do with mama and daddy, and a vigorous and necessary “culture of shame”.
Move forward to today on the metro, these “young ladies” are really just uncouth scallywags with nothing remotely approaching the home learning you and I received. Back in the day, they would have been unceremoniously corrected by adults present without any fear or self-recrimination. In my sphere on my metro they would be unceremoniously corrected like back in the day, replete with the implicit old-school variable of I think I hear violence
The behavior of these scallywags was inexcusable and by dint of their lack of proper home instruction and socialization, they’re unemployable.
Extrapolate from their behavior on the metro bus to their preceding behavior in school in classes all day that day. Urban public high school is full of ineducable scallywags and troglodytes who exhibit EXACTLY the same behavior all day long and the adults in those urban publich high schools don’t have the wherewithal to curb the behavior that lack of parental investment and control has produced.
It’s really sad to see how that inexcusable nonsense negatively impacts the kids at school who have received a little parental investment and who are attending school trying to learn something.
i skipped it because i skipped the deviant part. the apparatus you’re talking about was developed for “the race”. it’s one of the tools that old guard you talk about developed to help keep the folk in line. it worked in other ways of course, but that’s the big one. the logic was “if we act right, we’ll GET our rights.”
it didn’t quite work out that way.
and while i don’t know where those kids went to school, it’s unlikely they went to poly, city, or western, the only three public high schools in the city that routinely send kids to college. they are likely in classrooms that don’t work, taught by teachers who don’t work, stuck in schools that don’t work.
so given this, what do they have to hang their hat on, as far as the public/private dynamic goes? what do they use to determine what’s appropriate and what’s not?
The “old guard” was your parents and mine. You act right and I act right. Difference between you and me, is about 3 inches and 100lbs and a violentized reptile brain. I internalized all of what my parents expected of me, and like many another man of my generation with similarly violentized reptile brains, I expect these children to deport themselves in public as if there are others present whom they must consider and respect.
The Japanese have maintained this apparatus for centuries with the consequence that you can leave your bicycle unlocked in downtown Tokyo for the day and pick it up unmolested that evening. You know, frankly, I don’t give two tenths of a dayyum about where these underinvested spawn hang their hats, what I do care about is that they begin to exhibit consideration for others in public places – and failing to do so – I’d just as soon see the death squads go into operation quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Dood, when the last time you visited Tijuana or Juarez? I just got back from San Diego last night, and to look out across what has become of that 3rd worlded megacity just across the border because it’s overrun with ni nis (no education, no jobs, no prospects) is unbelievable. They are a plague, and, the raw kindling for the civil war raging in Mexico.
Given another decade and the continuing economic contraction in the U.S., what’s the difference between these adolescent monsters on the bus and the ni nis decamped in Juarez? The well-being of these kids is not my problem, it’s not your problem, except as it intrudes upon your quality of life in the commons. No, their rude and contentious alienation from polite society is strictly their own problem, and their underinvested parent’s problem who spawned and neglected them.
Last time I checked, a bullet is exponentially cheaper than single day of ineffectual public school “education”, and a lot less expensive than a single day of incarceration.