Catch the Bus

Steve Jobs never intended the iPhone to be nothing more than a fast way to check and send a few emails without having to be at the desk. The social change in how we talk to each other has gone through a revolution of sorts, leading to massive gatherings on a large scale, and looking down, holding a device in hand, oblivious to our surroundings. With inflation entrenched, and double income earners in the family household now the norm, where has our dinner table discussion gone?

The link attached is to a recent New York Times article about assisted suicide in our youth. My frustration comes from how our society is set up, in that jurisdiction and artificial political and social ‘norms’ compartmentalize how we express ourselves.

One of my most tender and moving service aspects was to allow broken souls get a free ride to the Langley Porter facility on the 6 Parnassus, or the ER rooms at St. Francis medical on the 49 line passing nearby on Van Ness, or the 1 California to California Pacific Campus Medical Center between Webster and Buchanan on Sacramento. The more painstaking drop offs were at St. Mary’s by Golden Gate Park as our terminal moved from 6 Ave. to Shrader and Fulton right by the hospital. Those who were denied access to help would lounge at our break spot and occupy all of our rest time with drama and anger: do we really want to take them all the way back to 6th St.? Hopefully, we could distract them into walking over to Haight Street or Golden Gate Park.

One of the ‘skills’ I would teach as a line trainer, was to make sure how to drop off those on the 14 Mission and 21 Hayes to use the around the block method to drop off any sleepers or stinkers BEFORE arriving at the inbound or outbound terminals. Note that my terms of those who may have nowhere to go have been reduced to two words to describe them. This is, of course, a part of the problem. In the link to this story in the Times, are a whole other set of promising youth who take their lives–but I couldn’t help but post this blog about the phrase used to commit suicide, “Catch the bus.”