American society likes to think of itself as classless. Tolerant. Understanding and Accepting of other modes of existence.

Well, any middle-class white kid who survives long enough to graduate from public school soon realizes that this isn’t the case (the underprivileged black, brown, and yellow kids figured it out just a little sooner). One of the places where this fact comes into sharp focus is if you ride the public transportation system.

Riding “The Metro” is not a symbol of universal loser status. There are some cities, especially in Europe or the Eastern US, where the Metro is the Great Equalizer – where the homeless man and the stockbroker ride side by side. But other climes, such as the great suburbanous mass known locally as SoCal, function on the assumption that if you’re not a pauper, an idiot, or senile, you’ll own and drive your own car – thus relegating Public Transport to the dregs of society. And you can learn a lot about a society by who’s at the Bottom.

Actually, there aren’t that many surprises as far as that goes. One gets the feeling that the people at the bottom here are the kind that have been at the bottom since Cain built Enoch. The immigrants. The insane. The indigent. The young. The Sidhe-inspired poets with minimum-wage jobs and no cars.

But the thing about humanity is that it is, inexplicably, most beautiful when it seems like it shouldn’t be. Even when it’s not beautiful, it is alive – striving, breathing, whole, Human. The ancient homeless woman wearing the old fur coat and various thrift-store baubles tells a wordless story about age, beauty and loss.  The quarrelous Vietnamese grannies and their unshakeable menfolk remind me of the value of a society that will take in and assimilate an entire generation of refugees.  Regardless of your views on immigration, illegal workers, and anchor babies, that little Latina two-year old wearing a pink Dodgers hat and the remnants of her Cheerios breakfast makes everyone’s life a tic or two better – for the 20 or so minutes before she, her laborer parents and her two or three siblings exit the yellow-striped doors.

Almost makes one want to sing.

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