Politics on the Bus

The way our week breaks down, we are grand-kid free for the 48 hours from about 1:00 p.m. or so on Monday to 1:30-ish on Wednesday. We do a lot of our errand running in that time, and today was no exception. We went to Brookside, which is one of the coolest neighborhoods in Kansas City - If I were going to live in a single-family dwelling instead of an apartment (fat chance!) I would live there.

Brookside is a neighborhood where the houses have front porches, the streets have sidewalks, and both features are well-used. The neighborhood is served by both the 57 and the MAX lines, so it's insanely convenient for me. Public transit in Kansas City was, apparently, designed for the people who reside in my building, and it's tailor made for my exact lifestyle. But then, I am one of those disgusting, born-under-a-lucky-star people. My life has been a never-ending succession of ridiculously fortuitous occurrences. I am thankful every day that I live in such a totally kick-ass universe.

So anyway, I took the morning off. (I'm starting to get the hang of this retired thing, after almost a year.) We went and jacked around in Brookside. We had coffee, we bought groceries, I went to the beauty supply, we went to the drug store, we went to the fair-trade store, we had some more coffee, we went to the Dime Store, we had lunch, then got home an hour before Zoe came home. Like I said, we're getting the hang of this "retired" thing.

As we were getting on the bus to come home, a car on 63rd street went through the light sporting the bumper sticker above. I pointed and read it aloud. The bus driver said "Whose that? Bush?" and I rolled my eyes and said "Yes." Someone else piped up from the back of the bus and said "I wish that sumbitch would drop dead," and everyone aboard started agreeing that that would be splendid indeed. The bus driver said "Yeah, but it's too late now," as I swiped my transfer. "No it's not," I said. "The sonofabitch still has the power to pardon." And three or four of the folks who were encouraging the universe to remove aWol from our midst stopped to look at me approvingly, then a young black man in a group of four or five looked at one of the people in his group and said "That's why I keep telling you we need to impeach his ass, even if he is almost gone. He can still pardon all these mother fuckers, and that ain't right. We impeach him he can't do that."

It does my heart good to see that undercurrent of outrage tapped to the degree that it is prevalent on public transit to the point that people remove their earbuds and participate. As long as there are pockets of people who engage, there is hope for America.