501 Express, Brighton-Downtown. The bus is full. As the diesel engine roars to a cruising speed, that is all you hear. It’s eerily quiet save for the recorded message in the bus’ intercom reminding us to keep our patriotic eyes open for abandoned bags and suspicious behavior…
Can the weird quietness be due to a city-wide call for some prolonged moment of silence over yesterday’s reported murder of civilians in Iraq? I wonder…At the risk of being reported by the other riders to the driver for suspicious behavior, I dare to look around and check for emotion in the eyes of my fellow bus riders to explore my moment of silence theory…Looks like I was wrong.
The faces of the 40 plus people on the bus are not reflective of any emotion over the war, or over the pending terrorist attack by Israel against the Palestinian people, or over the sight of the homeless people downtown that we see out of our bus’ window every day. No. These are emotionless faces I see. Made silent in their expressions through what appears to be an interconnected web of i-pod wires and one giant glossy magazine with few words and lots of pictures. New England White faces from a world where compartmentalization, fear of “the other”, individualist isolation and consumption of mass media have triumphed. As if a barrage of celebrity pictures and mediocre pop music could fill the abyss of our desperate loneliness…
40 people intentionally avoiding eye contact, fearfully avoiding the power of words uttered by the person next to them but not those blasting out of their plasma screens. Fear of what could happen if the plastic barrier of their over-sized sunglasses were to melt. After all, maybe they know that dioxin is a very dangerous byproduct of molten plastic…
Maybe I’ve just gone crazy, or maybe we are all simply waiting…Our perceived complacency and apathy but a temporary lapse in our trajectory to inner transformation, a frozen moment of metamorphosis before we erupt into spontaneous celebration and the embracing of the culture of refusal and revolution…
Wait. I hear a voice. Maybe someone in the back is reading my thoughts and popping open the Cuban rum!
Wrong again…
“Hello”, says someone behind me, one of the i-pod earphone wires dangling over his shoulder while he places the phone to his ear, “we are entering the freeway now. It’s jammed. I’ll be late. Bye.”
The advertiser in my head says, “Stuck in traffic? Sprint is there for you with coverage in all 50 states and with unlimited daytime minutes. Not bad. Can I sell this? Then again, no one wants to talk without limits anymore. In-depth communications hinders our addiction to mindless distraction…
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