It's amazing what can happen on a typical BART journey. One minute, you're gazing out the window pondering life — and the next, someone is cussing at the top of their lungs, sneezing in your face and refusing to turnover their seat to a senior.
But now, thanks to social media and the prevalence of smartphone cameras, there is nowhere to hide for the worst BARTiquette rule breakers. The "BART Idiot Hall of Fame" is a Facebook group dedicated to "outing" the most impolite and downright strange BART riders, providing a place for venting, sharing pictures and relaying stories. The group has more than 1,800 members so far.
There are plenty of complaints about seat hoggers, door rushers and bicyclists, as well as a few tales of the weird and wonderful world of a BART ride. Some recent highlights include:
- A picture of a man relaxing in a hammock that he had hung from the railing
- A picture of a couple of intoxicated men praying to the BART Gods, post-vomit
- A picture of a man watching pornography on his video-enabled device during the morning commute
Who would you add to the "BART Idiot Hall of Fame"? Share your stories in the comments below, or add a picture by clicking "upload photos and videos."
Oh, and I never said the ride to work was miserable. My job was so awful that I looked forward to the ride on BART. At least it's never a dull moment.
I was commuting into the city a few years back and I see a open seat at the back of the train, but it turns out there is a old gross ass drunk guy laying down sleeping. I walk away from him and stand near the door. We start to go down the Tran bay Tube when I hear this lady yell “Oh NO, it’s on my new purse”. What had happened is the gross drunk guy woke up and urinated right there from his seat and when the train headed down, his urine made its way down the train. So all these professional type commuters were scrambling and yelling like they were being attacked by sharks. I had to laugh and so did the drunk guy. Good times on BART, especially if you ain’t got anything else to do but be a creepy drunk guy.
Most of the Euro and Asian cultures have largely been homogenous (all the same culture and nationality). We have been a melting pot that depends on shared sacrifice to develop a sense of commonality which contributes to a culture and concern for others like them. We now have a political climate and culture of "me" that is driven by politics of victimhood and complete justification of virtually any abhorrent behavior as long as it meets their or some microgroup's idea of freedom. Europe is catching up to us quickly with the mass migration of 3rd world immigrants spreading throughout Europe essentially destroying their peaceful homogenous existence and bringing their culture down to our level. Without a shared sacrifice like major disaster,war, etc. it will continue on this path.
And she starts beating the living hell out of this guy with her purse. His look goes stone-cold sober knowing she's called his bluff. She sits back down. And he walks into the next car and the path that the passengers had made vanishes. And from the next car? Screaming. All over again.
Scapegoating and blaming immigrants/minorities has been a cruel and ignorant position to take in the past, it has caused more suffering and problems for mankind and obviously isn't a solution to improve the ills of our society; it actually contributes to and may be a cause (e.g. concentration camps, McCarthy era, Jim Crow laws/slavery, Irish & Chinese in 1800's Native Americans, Salem witch trials, etc, etc). So howzabout we put our brain power in a different direction instead of beating a very old and diseased horse in this unconscious need for displacement and blame.. "Scapegoating occurs when one group of people in a society are experiencing problems that prompt them to place blame on another group of people." Edmund Burke (1729-1797) statement, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." Burke was a British Statesman and Philosopher who is generally viewed as the philosophical founder of modern political conservatism. I learned this in high school: from Arthur Miller's "The Crucible:": "What lay behind the procedures of both witch trial and political hearing was a familiar American need to assert a recoverable innocence even if the only guarantee of such innocence lay in the displacement of guilt onto others."
Speak to most any reasonable resident of France,England, Netherlands,Germany,Greece,Spain. They will universally tell you diversity is way overrated. They liked it better when they were much more homogenous. We are great and horrible due to the same and have been for 200+ years. We are the disfunctional family of the world. Somehow a balance will need to be struck. You can't force people to accept what they know makes them miserable. It's not bigotry, it's self preservation/survival.
Thank you CJ for my own reality check and I mean that sincerely. We're all in this together.
But back to BART, I think it scares some people because it is a mixing place of different kinds of people and people are afraid of the unfamiliar. Maybe they feel safer in their isolated suburban setting of more one kind of people. When if you look at history, it is one kind of people cut off from other cultures that builds paranoia and misinformation and mistrust of others not like them. Even can lead to genocide and war. Same kind of people is boring as hell imo.
Lend a hand, open you heart. How low does Berkeley Patch have to go with these unmindful - juvenile in nature tropes?
Many people simply cannot identify with the plight of people who look or talk or act differently from what they are used to and cannot bring themselves to care about their challenges. It is that neglect that creates so many of our social problems.