(no subject)

[alonewiththemoon]

On the bus I took from Inman to Harvard last night, the driver was playing some talk radio show that was pretty blatantly racist towards Arabs--you know the kind of thing, "these people are savages, they are incapable of understanding what it means to be civilized, we have the weaponry to do it so I don't understand why we don't just bomb the Middle East and have done with them." The show also talked about how all Muslim marriages are child rape and was getting into pretty overt Jewish conspiracy theory stuff when I got off the bus. Of course the driver has a perfect right to be as racist and bigoted and stupid as he wants in his personal life, but I don't think it's appropriate to inflicting it all on the passengers. So I wrote down the bus number and reported it to the T this morning. In a way, I feel a little guilty on two counts--one, I should have said something to the driver then and there. Two, I feel like a tattletale who is getting the guy in trouble, when he was a fine bus driver apart from the radio show thing. To be tremendously charitable, maybe he couldn't believe what he was hearing either and was just guilty of bad judgment in listening to it while on the job. But I think I did the right thing to report it. We'll see if I hear anything back from the T.

Comments

[silas7.livejournal.com]

Speaking to the bus driver might be perilously close to "telling him what to do", and I'm particularly sensitive to that these days.

Writing a letter to the T is fine. Either they will listen to you and speak to him about it, or they will throw it out. But you will have voiced your concern. It is public transportation after all.

[alonewiththemoon]

Speaking to the bus driver might be perilously close to "telling him what to do", and I'm particularly sensitive to that these days.

heh ;) If I had spoken to the bus driver, it would have been more of an fyi, your radio show is offending at least one passenger. i would not have told him to turn it off, as he probably outweighed me by 200 percent!

The fact that it's public transportation is the point I made in my letter--it should be nonpartisan.

[silas7.livejournal.com]

Ask him if you can listen to Al Franken at the next stop!

[nepenthedreams]

That's funny because I heard a terrible radio show myself and couldn't stop listening to it - I just wanted someone to say something to him or was hoping he'd reveal it was all a horrible joke. then I thought that perhaps if I was listening to it, I would be counted in the "ratings" for the show, so I changed the channel.