There are some who believe public transportation is, somehow, beneath them. This is a very American way of thinking. The US has a long, well-documented car culture. The infrastructure is designed to necessitate owning a car. Therefore, owning a car is part of everyday life for most. The nicer the car, the higher the social status - at least that's how it's always been marketed. Most don't realize it's a con, but that's a story for another day. We own two cars. Once upon a time, that would give the impression, to most people, that we are doing well. In reality, it's just necessity. We live in a relatively quiet suburb of a medium-sized city, by American standards. And yes, we do have public transportation. By global standards, ours isn't great. It's overpriced and limited. Out where we live, I can catch a bus once an hour. The bus is usually relatively clean and there are rarely more than a handful of riders. Most of my neighbors probably feel they'r...
Hotel Oldsmobile. That’s what all of us kids called him. Yeah, kids are cruel. He was just a guy in a really bad spot in life. With our clean-cut all-American upbringings, we treated him the way we’d been taught. We treated him like garbage . He was maybe in his 40s or 50s. White guy. Eyes like a husky. Dirty. Needed a haircut and a shave. He was a short guy - maybe 5'4 - and had the build of a man who had spent a lifetime doing hard labor - the sort a man does because it’s his only option. None of us really knew him. We didn’t know what his story was. None of us were smart enough to even try to make one up. All that we really knew was he was dirty and lived in a rusted-out Oldsmobile. These days, the media uses bullshit terms like “ unhoused ”. Fuck that, the man was homeless. Without that car, he’d have been sleeping on the streets. Our streets. This was the early 1980s. The real boom of homelessness hadn’t kicked in yet - at least not in our little river town. He was our ...