Five people you should be allowed to beat senseless on public transit
Recently a mother was charged with beating a 71-year-old woman who criticized her rude manners and child rearing and a man was arrested for kicking a pregnant woman in the belly on a 4 train. Such savage assaults are not surprising, sorry to say. While people join in the moral hate of these accused, it begs the question: who does deserve to be beaten on our subways and busses? We agree that the pregnant and the elderly should be spared violence except under extremely rare circumstances. But there are certainly many for whom swift and destructive violence is richly deserved.
Below are modest descriptions of the five people who are worthy of vigilante justice.
People who bring bicycles onto trains. Does anyone have any excuse to bring a bicycle on a train, ever? This is your method of transportation. If you got caught in the rain, too bad. Read the weather forecast before you bring your two-wheeled throne of entitled ineptitude onto our train car. The worse I’ve seen was a guy with a motorized scooter on the train. A motorized scooter! This also applies to people who bring awkwardly large objects onto the subway. I’ve seen people bring all manner of inappropriately large items onto public transit during rush hour. Baby strollers are the most tolerable item since some mothers don’t have a choice as to when they travel. But a bicycle on the subway? With the exception of the rare bike race in town, there should be no such thing.
People who stand in front of doors or enter the subway before everyone leaves. I have often dreamt of investing in some sort of spinning blades on a stick that one can set on fire while pulling into the station. I feel with the right tools we could eliminate much of the population in my neighborhood of Flushing. No subway seat is so precious that you should surrender your dignity.
Rush hour panhandlers and performers. One should never give money to panhandlers at all as a general rule. Even the most sympathetic advocates for the homeless will tell you that the majority of cash you hand over to beggars is used for drugs or alcohol (giving food is another issue). But if someone is trying to walk through a packed subway car to collect money, then they deserve a knuckle sandwich and should appeal to their bleeding-heart suckers during a less-crowded time. I usually go out of my way to give money to performers. Musicians and other people who make our lives richer with their art deserve our support. The sensible performers would not walk through a crowded subway car at rush hour. They know to avoid crowded trains because they are considerate and good at what they do.
People who wear backpacks on trains and buses. If you wear a backpack onto a subway or bus, you are a jackass. Not only are you taking up too much space and making it difficult for people to move around you, you are putting your own personal belongings out of your view and at greater risk of theft. True justice would be to slice open these backpacks and allow the contents thereof to spill onto the floor. This may end up causing a stamped to grab these items, creating a greater disorder and inconveniencing law-abiding commuters. Also the authorities may take issue with a knife being used in this way. A good public prank would be to glue very large and garish dildos to these backpacks. According to the police, such acts are not vandalism and they’ll have no reason to report you to the authorities if you are caught in the act (note: not all police may take the same view as the slacker cops I encountered in Flushing).
Pole hogs and seat hogs. Unless you are a stripper performing in a strip club, you have no business putting any part of your body other than your hand on the subway pole. If you weigh 800 pounds and take up more than one seat, then OK, you’re doing us a favor not trying to stand on the subway and you’ll die of a heart attack soon enough. If you are a more regularly-proportioned individual and you are taking up more than one seat, then you deserve a boot to the face. Your luggage didn’t pay $2.75 to ride the bus or train.
Honorable mentions for New York street justice in transit: people who neglect to wear headphones while listening to music or watching videos, those clipping their nails on the bus or train, and anyone who stands on the left side of an escalator.
Our public transit will never be a cocoon of luxury and good tidings. We don’t need that. But some common decency and courtesy would go a long way. There’s nothing morally wrong with a little bit of “the old ultraviolence” on some of our fellow Big Apple denizens who weren’t raised with the same manners, I realize that these are but fleeting dreams. We cannot visit such extreme justice on all who deserve it. If we did so we would do nothing else. But let us join together in these sweet day dreams and get through our day the better for it.
Happy commuting everyone.
Top five people it’s OK to punch in New York City
There’s been a lot of discussion in the news of recent political violence in this country. Scuffles have broken out at political rallies between protesters and supporters of rival candidates. Protests have gotten ugly. The overwhelming majority of Americans deplore violence of all kinds.
We’ll have no shortage of political ugliness in New York. Some of it has already gotten under way in earnest. But our Gotham is full of human abominations that people of all political affiliations can agree ought to be subjected to swift and brutal physical punishment on sight. Here is a catalog of the top five worthy subjects:
People who stand on the left side of the escalator. Sometimes people don’t realize that they have committed this infraction and there are people who come to New York from parts of the world where escalators are rare (watching Haitians attempt to board an escalator at JFK airport was an eye-opening experience), and they are usually sensible enough to move aside when you say “excuse me.” But some people think that an escalator is an amusement park ride, and they ought to have some common sense and manners beaten into them frequently and without mercy.
People who read their smartphone, kindle or book while walking. You can see these zombies a mile away and each one of them thinks they are the rare exception that can pull it off and not be that plodding imbecile impeding the progress of our precious Gotham. They are wrong. Trample them underfoot. They are not fit to live here.
People who use public transit seats for their luggage. Unless your purse or backpack paid $2.75 to ride this crowded bus or subway, let it sit on the floor or on your lap, or else you will find a host of volunteers willing to cram it up your ass.
Cyclists who ride on sidewalks, run red lights and ride on the wrong side the road. It is never these rancid, entitled brats who are dragged to their deserved deaths by garbage trucks or city buses, but it should be. If I’d go to jail for doing it with a car, don’t you dare try it with a bicycle. What’s most galling is when they yell at pedestrians to get out of their way as they are preparing to run a red light.
People who listen to music or watch videos in public spaces without earphones. Some people are not content speaking on their cell phones in theaters, they want to bring the theater experience with them and everyone within earshot. Simply inform these people that their earphones must be broken since you can hear their sports event/Chinese soap opera/rap mix tape, etc. If they don’t get to the hint, see to it that their devices and jaw is broken as well.
Can we all get along? Yes, we can all agree that some people need to learn some manners. New Yorkers can unite around these common enemies.
The Horror That Is The 7 Train
Speaking in 1999, Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker said the following about New York City:
“Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing…”
Saturday Night Live’s Colin Quinn, doing the weekly news spot, said this about Rocker: “He might be a bigot, but he’s definitely been on the 7 train.”
Despite all the romantic notions you may have in your head about New York, there are some traditional New York experiences that are never pleasant no matter how much you romanticize them. Being mugged is never fun; neither is stepping in dog shit or having to smell a homeless person.
Another old New York tradition that is no fun is the 7 train. The 7 train is a human cattle car of endless misery and inconvenience. It perfectly combines all the incompetence of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority with the rancid overpopulation of our city that makes New York the cultural calling card of the dying American empire.
I live in Flushing, Queens and work in lower Manhattan. I have an hour-and-15-minute commute each way when things go well, but things rarely go well. I take a bus to downtown Main Street Flushing, which has a crowd density similar to that of Times Square, and board a 7 train that takes me to Grand Central, where I take either the 4 or 5 train (also no joy) to the Bowling Green station near where I work.
Today I managed to get down the overcrowded stairs to the train platform only to miss the closing doors of a not-very-crowded 7 train by seconds. The next express train arrived soon but sat on the platform for 10 minutes and didn’t leave the station until it was wall-to-wall people.
Sometimes the 7 train likes to quit on you and dump all of its passengers out a random stop. “This train is out of service! No passengers!” the conductor will announce. Sometimes the express 7 train decides to go local, sometimes without telling its passengers until they’re at a stop they didn’t plan on making. On the weekends, the 7 train doesn’t run any express trains at all and often will have large service gaps that will leave its passengers scrambling to shuttle busses or trying to find alternate trains to take.
In September, when the U.S. Open is happening at the U.S. Tennis Center, the 7 train is flooded with tennis fans who are clueless as to where they are going and completely unschooled in subway etiquette. Sometimes a perfect storm of passenger clusterfuck will happen and you’ll have Mets fans and U.S. Open fans cramming the same trains heading to the Willets Point station.
The 7 train will often stop service entirely or delay service torturously or decided it doesn’t want to run express trains at the height of rush hour. Often the reason the MTA gives passengers for this is “signal problems.” One winter I asked an MTA worker on the platform why express service was abruptly canceled and he answered, “It’s cold outside, sir.”
I don’t bother trying to get a seat on the 7 train. Those are the dominion of sharp-elbowed Asian women who push their way onto the trains before the unfortunate souls who have to commute to Flushing can exit. I actually prefer to stand. I’ll actually have more room standing and the ride isn’t that long. Besides, I sit on my ass for eight hours at work. I usually try to position myself directly between two car doors in the center of the car, where the crush of passengers will be slightly less.
It is often standing-room only before the trains leave its first stop, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to cram themselves on to the train at later stops.
The 7 train is one of the oldest lines in the city, so its rails are close together and the cars that fit on the tracks are narrow and without as much room as other trains. It is also the only subway serving some of the most densely populated parts of the city and it terminates (for now) in Times Square.
And the 7 train is about to get worse. The geniuses who run our transit system decided it would be a good idea to cram 15 pounds of ham into this 5-pound bag instead of 10, so the 7 line is being expanded all the way to 34th Street and 11th Avenue. This means more crowding on a subway line that can barely handle what its current ridership. Joy.
There are some upsides to the 7 train. Most of it is above ground, so you can see some beautiful views of Queens and Manhattan that you won’t see from any other train line. Also, while it is regularly packed to the gills, most of the riders are working New Yorkers who are not there to cause problems; you don’t have the thug element of the A train or the hipster abominations of the L line. Because the trains are so crowded all the time, you have fewer homeless and crazies. I have never seen a “Showtime!” subway dance troupe try to ply their obnoxious trade on the 7 train.
For all its faults, the 7 line has stood the test of time, and if overcrowding doesn’t bring it crumbling to the ground this year, someone will be bitching and moaning about it 100 years from now.
Matthew Sheahan 
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