Tales from the Transit Strike
I snapped a photo from the long, snaking line I waited in tonight just to enter Penn Station to get home, but my Treo 600 has a pretty crappy camera, so it's really not worth posting. Take my word - it was long and snakelike.
Suffice to say, it took a half hour just to get inside the darn terminal due to the high volume of people heading out on one of the only train lines left in service during the strike. I almost made it inside in half the time, but an eagle-eyed cop saw me try to sneak under the barricades to cut the line. Busted. In my mid-40s, I'm still a rebel. (But I still managed to shake the fuzz when they tried to redirect us once again once we got near the entrance to one a block away. I maneuvered my way inside by pretending to head towards New Jersey Transit. As if.)
Unlike my husband, who has to walk about 40 blocks downtown to work, I usually head to and from work on foot for the exercise so the strike hasn't affected me too badly. I feel for the people from the outer boroughs who depend solely on the subway. Especially those who don't get paid if they can't get to work and can't afford to get to work now if they don't get paid. Catch-22.
Which doesn't mean I don't see the union's side, too. Despite the mayor's protestations that this is an illegal strike, the original strikes that begat organized labor were illegal, too. Sometimes you have to buck the system in order to effect change.
Just from an experiential point of view, any kind of mass experience like the strike, the blackout and 9/11 does tend to bring out a friendliness in NYC that isn't often apparent in the day-to-day sturm and drang of city life. Strangers commiserate with strangers, police officers with bullhorns unleash their inner comedians (One cop tonight, after announcing the entrances that were open for varying commuters hastened to add that buses and trains were running smoothly in Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC, so if anyone wanted to head there on Amtrak, they could use the entrance on 8th Avenue. That gave the crowd a good communal chuckle).
Once inside, I hooked up with the husband and we luckily made it home in time to play with the kiddos for a bit before bedtime.
I hope the strike ends soon, but in the meantime, for us New Yorkers, it's just business as usual. Only it's a little more unusual due to the strike. And we're all just taking it in stride.
Suffice to say, it took a half hour just to get inside the darn terminal due to the high volume of people heading out on one of the only train lines left in service during the strike. I almost made it inside in half the time, but an eagle-eyed cop saw me try to sneak under the barricades to cut the line. Busted. In my mid-40s, I'm still a rebel. (But I still managed to shake the fuzz when they tried to redirect us once again once we got near the entrance to one a block away. I maneuvered my way inside by pretending to head towards New Jersey Transit. As if.)
Unlike my husband, who has to walk about 40 blocks downtown to work, I usually head to and from work on foot for the exercise so the strike hasn't affected me too badly. I feel for the people from the outer boroughs who depend solely on the subway. Especially those who don't get paid if they can't get to work and can't afford to get to work now if they don't get paid. Catch-22.
Which doesn't mean I don't see the union's side, too. Despite the mayor's protestations that this is an illegal strike, the original strikes that begat organized labor were illegal, too. Sometimes you have to buck the system in order to effect change.
Just from an experiential point of view, any kind of mass experience like the strike, the blackout and 9/11 does tend to bring out a friendliness in NYC that isn't often apparent in the day-to-day sturm and drang of city life. Strangers commiserate with strangers, police officers with bullhorns unleash their inner comedians (One cop tonight, after announcing the entrances that were open for varying commuters hastened to add that buses and trains were running smoothly in Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC, so if anyone wanted to head there on Amtrak, they could use the entrance on 8th Avenue. That gave the crowd a good communal chuckle).
Once inside, I hooked up with the husband and we luckily made it home in time to play with the kiddos for a bit before bedtime.
I hope the strike ends soon, but in the meantime, for us New Yorkers, it's just business as usual. Only it's a little more unusual due to the strike. And we're all just taking it in stride.
posted by workinmom at 10:02 PM
1 Comments:
I'm really glad to read your perspective on the strikers. I've seen so many blogs that are really unsympathetic or just plain angry, and it makes me sad to realize how little those folks are aware of the gains made on their behalf by strikers in the past. (On a personal note--one of my grandfathers was in the San Francisco General Strike in 1934, in which two strikers were killed by police.)
We're going to NYC on Christmas Day, and I'm sure that, if the strike's still going on, we will be inconvenienced. But it's nowhere close to the inconvenience that we will suffer if workers can's strike anymore.
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