Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision in the Supreme Court. It also marks the fourth day out of six that we’ve had some sort of demonstration or march in DC.
You’d think, being the free speech advocate that I am, I’d be happy about this. I’m not. Saturday my spouse and I went down to the peace rally at the Capitol with two of our friends who’d flown in from Dallas.
I have to say that I admire people, regardless of whether or not I agree with them, who’d travel thousands of miles to march for what they believe in. What I don’t admire is the lack of respect that marchers of every stripe show the people who actually have to live in this city.
They don’t think in the subway. They drive their cars and buses and vans to the city and then bitch when there’s no place to park (no, heightened security hasn’t had any effect on daily life here in the Nation’s Capital). And they stubbornly refuse to realize that the first amendment protects my right to tell them to shove the protest sign that’s hit me in the knee for the fourth time right up their ass just as much as it protects their right to march and shout about their chosen cause.
What really bothers me, really, really bothers me is the laisez-faire attitude of city services. Metro has a monopoly in this city. Public transit is all about the WMATA. You’d think with the permits that these marches have to get and the hellish process people have to go through with the MPD’s emergency response board (trust me, two years of running gay & lesbian pride in this city will teach you a thing or two about jumping through hoops) that city services like the MPD and like Metro would be able to plan for snarled traffic, confused visitors, hassled commuters, and a lot of people having trouble getting from there to here.
Instead, we get broken down buses, lines that stretch up and out of the subway stations because the trains are too short and not running frequently enough, and people standing in sub-zero weather waiting more than 60 minutes between buses when they are scheduled to run no farther apart than every 11 minutes.
Not my problem how Metro keeps its schedule. Station buses along the route. Run short on other routes. Put some long buses on routes that would normally have little, natural gas buses. I DON’T CARE. Just keep the damn schedule.
My 25 minute commute took two hours this evening. So just how is Metro going to pay me back for the hour and forty minutes of my life they stole because they are to lazy to plan for an event that happens on the same day every year?
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.