Enforced Mediocrity

I feel like a prisoner to mediocrity many mornings and evenings, shuttling back and forth to work on DC Metro (and perhaps for other reasons ha). DC Metro. That name has a good ring to it. The Nation’s Capital. The seat of power of the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Perhaps to introduce a (very) healthy dash of humility, introductory training for Freshman lawmakers (and perhaps the not so fresh as well) should include a requirement to have to commute via Metro for a couple months. Maybe the drive for government reform would be just that much stronger and more urgent as a result of what these aspiring legislators experienced. It would illustrate so many “fascinating” aspects of government management. And it’s a shame- that the most well worn experiences most people have with government often have to make those who fight for higher government performance and accountability and management look so pathetic. (As a disclaimer I am not proclaiming to be in this group, but I have seen them, they exist.)

If the keyword in our collective game of Family Feud was “government” I imagine the top five would be something like- taxes, DMV, seatbelts, waste, and- public transportation. If nothing else this is guilt by association. It often appears as if there is no leadership in Metro- which in and of itself is an impressive feat- to give the appearance of an utter lack of anything, a complete vacuum of management or direction or leadership. In this respect, deep space and the DC Metro are very alike. That, and they both cryogenically deep freeze the souls of any human beings who are exposed to them for more than a few minutes. Train time arrivals are like a game of dominos, the times change and cascade in different orders without warning- from perhaps, 2 to 12 minutes, with the swift authoritative and utterly random shift of an LED light. Hundreds of people fill the entire platform, sometimes up to 12 deep, awaiting a train that always arrives short two cars- needlessly leaving 25% of the platform unused. Passengers not uncommonly faint or get sick from the manual, jerky stop. My last ride from Adams Morgan to Dupont involved nine separate accelerations and brakings- to cover maybe seven blocks. There must be traffic ahead, or bumps in the tracks, or maybe a deer ran out in front. Trains arrive heading opposite downtown in an approximate three-to-one ratio to inbound trains in the mornings- and the reverse in the evening. Maybe the metro managers think rush hour works in reverse in DC. Escalators prove impossible to maintain for even a few consecutive days, with plywood cases often blocking them for weeks at a time.

Riding metro feels like stepping into the Great Depression. The energy level of grimaces, snipes, grunts, glances- mimic the feel of mass, shared suffering that defined that era. People throw their courtesies out the window- yesterday I got cut in front of by both a portly cheery-faced woman and a man with a Costco sized stroller. I don’t mind, it doesn’t bother me, I’d in fact gladly wait for the next train so they can board- which I did. But something tells me this isn’t these peoples’ normal personas. That maybe Metro naturally brings out the worst in people. That maybe that dad who girgles at his baby for two hours every night, also forearm shimmies people in the morning to slip down the escalator to catch the arriving train, and maybe he wonders what the hell he was doing at night, feels guilty, suppresses and channels that anger, and becomes a slightly more bitter, unhappy person. Perhaps this makes him a marginally worse father, worse husband, emotionally less available or feeling of his child. Perhaps Metro's service- our shared couple hours a week- tears slightly, but meaningfully at the fabric of our communities, our homes, our belief systems, our families- ourselves. Metro is a microcosm of the inert and faceless forces of modern life that simultaneously know nothing about us, but dictate the very minutia of our lives, that trusts a smaller and smaller bit of us everyday.

And before you write this off as a misanthropic diatribe (nothing about that is inherently unacceptable to me however) or observations divorced from the responsibility of constructive criticism end efforts at self-improvement- consider that Metro will get $150 million in Federal Funds this year to….very auspiciously- improve their service. Consider that every person I’ve talked to would pay more to have a better Metro, and none has ever complained about their $3.20 daily fare so they can save hundreds a year not driving. In June, nine people were tragically killed on Metro in a horrific accident. This is all the more reason to aspire to more, to a more efficient, safer train system- it is not a pretense to eliminate two cars off a train. I wish you could transfer Moscowans from 1920s Stalinist Russia to Washington, D.C.’s Metro in 2010 and explain that we have not figured out a way to safely operate an eight car train. It would utterly perplex them, as it should. Metro riders include some of the most hardworking, brilliant, beautiful, promising, driven, and often, powerful and influential, people in the country. This makes our shared enforced mediocrity all the more tragic.