on a bus in Manhattan. A man carting a bunch of heavy packages asked the bus driver to keep the wheelchair-lift lowered after a disabled person boarded to make it easier for him to get on. The bus driver refused and told him to go to the back and heave them up the stairs, which he reluctantly did. He loudly but good-naturedly complained to a few MTA workers (who were done with their shift?) sitting in the back about making things the hard way when there is an easier and kinder way. They did not sympathize, explaining how you should follow the rules and that the bus driver could lose his job if he didn’t. He countered how it’s okay to bend the rules sometimes to make lives easier for people and how being good to people is a nice thing etc. The black MTA man behind me started to explain to the white deliveryman how he’s done “a lot of bad sh.t” when he was younger, been to jail (”me too!” exclaimed his interlocutor, though that was for Vietnam draft dodging), but how he cleaned up and got his “sh.t together, and became a man”, and how following the rules is what gets you there. At this point of eavesdropping I’m pretty proud of him. Then he goes on to describe how hard it was for him after jail, and how he even had to “work for JEWS”. From that point the MTA man’s speech became a nonstop antisemitic rant, but thankfully it was my stop and I didn’t have to listen to it any longer.

I wonder if Trump really is already making it ok to be racist bigot etc, or has it always been like this and I’m just more attuned to it.

Also, that deliveryman must be in his 60s if he was dodging the draft. This country is too cruel – this kind of backbreaking work is not something that anyone should be doing at that age.