Metropass Jailbird

So today on the C-Train I met a guy who was fresh out of prison, for failing to produce a valid token to the Train Cops.

“Nice boots,” he said, after sitting down next to me. “Looks like they’re good for riding.”

“Thanks, that what I use them for.” I said, eyeing him up.  There was something nervous and juvenile looking about him – though I guessed his age to be somewhere in the late twenties.  Part of it was the baseball cap, but there was something about his posture.

He fidgeted a bit as the conversation died down, then he barked out a dry laugh. “Never going to trust my wife again,” he said.

“Oh yeah?  What happened?”

I expected a story along the lines of domestic spat-turned Protect and Serve, but instead he told me, “She didn’t wake me up and I fell asleep on the train.”

“Heh,” I chuckled.

Again our conversation died down.  It’d been a long day and I didn’t have much to say, but after a few seconds he broke the silence.

“So I just got out of jail,” he blurted out. “They caught me sneaking onto a train.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, my lips curling, “Listen, this is my stop – but you hang in there, alright pal?  Take care of yourself.”

Disgusting, I thought, as I stepped onto the platform.  Locking a man up in a cage like a goddamned animal, all because he was too broke to afford the $2.75 fare – or the $150 fine he got stuck with.  If I were him, I wouldn’t trust my old lady either.

Now I gotta say, given the stop where he’d got on, there was a decent chance he’d actually only been in the Downtown holding cell – not the Remand Centre, or prison proper – but the cold, dank rooms there had clearly been enought to put the Fear into him.  And no sane person could blame the poor guy.  It’s one thing being paraded around as an enemy POW.  That at least has got some dignity to it.  But when the local gang of Dudley Do-Rights slaps the bracelets on you and starts telling you where to stand, it’s pretty clear that you ain’t nothing but a hound dog.

You know, I always hear the same old refrain from the upper classes about how Poor People are such useless failures.  They like to pretend as if the Free Market would just eat these jokers up and spit out the piercings, but for the Tax Payer’s magnanimity that keeps a roof over their heads.  Welfare Queens and Dead Beats, the lot of ’em, am I right?

But here’s what’s really going on.

Sure, society likes to hand out all sorts of unasked for shit to these guys – and you’re damned right that they take what’s offered, seldom with a nod of gratitude – but not fifteen minutes after coming home with their welfare check, these guys gotta deal with a harassing call from the Government demanding they go and pay their speeding fine.  After that they gotta drop another $100 on a safety and emissions check for their vehicle.  Then $800 for repairs, which is more than they paid for the damned thing in the first place.

They get kicked out of apartments they can’t afford, because the landlord has to insulate the walls against a fire that’ll never happen, and they get tossed into shitty government projects, where the Number One cause of high-crime is the number of cops sniffing around for an excuse to kick down a door.

And let’s not even talk about cigarette- and liquor taxes, let alone Government run lotteries.

Every day of their lives, these guys have to deal with The Man hoofing them in the nuts – and then the suit-wearing pricks downtown, who wouldn’t dirty their hands with the Police Department’s violence any more than they’d butcher their own meat, look down their noses at ’em, and hand over a charity cheque.

Do the poor bastards ever complain?  Of course not.  This has been going on their whole lives, it’s the Standard Operating Procedure, the normal state of affairs.  So why question it?

You know, this guy called Hegel once wrote something about the Master-Slave Diabetic… but like I said, it’s been a long day, and I don’t feel like looking it up right now.  But I wonder what he’d say, if he ever saw how fucked up this world is?

Hell, he’d probably just sit in Starbucks and download music from the iStore.  That’s what Deep Thinkers do nowadays, after all.