From a reader: an incident in Toronto

1 December 2006

Last night in Toronto, I was on the subway train coming home from work and it stopped abruptly at Dundas Station and I felt a bump and then all the lights went out and on the platform people were screaming and looking horrified and one girl vomited because someone just threw themselves under the train and blood spurted up everywhere. My train car was absolutely jammed as it was rush hour and we were trapped in the car as the doors wouldn’t open because there was no power.

Then this man in a three-piece suit who was also in the car started saying very loudly that “this piece of trash should have killed himself at home” and that he had an appointment and was going to be late because of this “piece of shit” and now even his taxpayers’ dollars will be wasted cleaning up his “shit-guts” from the station, etc. etc. Well, I couldn’t allow that to go unchallenged so, in a deathly silent and dark, jam-packed car I piped up, “Keep your poison to yourself. We don’t need to hear it. A man is dead. He was a human being.”

Well, the suit guy, who was at the other end of the car, got really mad at that and started fighting his way through the crowd trying to get at me and cursing and just spewing poison about Iraq and Afghanistan and how it’s 2007 and “filth’s gotta” be cleaned off the face of the earth. But the crowd took my side and people began shouting, “He’s right. We don’t need your poison here,” and “Shut up idiot,” and they blocked the guy and he just had to stand there cursing to himself until we were finally released from the car after about 10 minutes. Then the train guard said, “If you have any children, please shield their eyes,” as we marched past the Xmas shoppers and the blood and the pieces of flesh on the floor.

CB

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

29 November 2006