Once and Future Freedoms: An Open Letter to a Woman Encountered on the CTA Red Line

Dear Madam,

I will be honest: you're probably not a reader of this online blog. I am aware that my readership is somewhat limited in scope and nature, and that it is absolutely unreasonable of me to expect a complete stranger to take an interest in my writings. This is especially certain given that I have no means of ever reaching you, contacting you, or even guaranteeing that our paths will cross once again (though the last is out of my control, as the ease and accessibility of public transit in this town is coupled with a certain unpredictability of contact). I will continue to be honest when I say that, quite frankly, I couldn't care less if we were to never see each other again; I cannot be certain that this will disappoint you, but given the nature of our interaction, I am led to believe that you could also care less.

I must frame the context of our interaction by telling the story of what happened on this afternoon on the CTA Red Line, this afternoon being the coldest day of the young 2013. In the interest of painting an unbiased portrayal of events, I will first give an observer's description of what occurred, followed by my respective thoughts and opinions. (You might feel that this afternoon was fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of your life's history, and this may well be the case, but as far as I am concerned, I have a certain duty to post a commentary on what transpired on our subway car.)

I had just gotten off work from my busy restaurant located in the heart of downtown Chicago (although busy might be a liberal overuse of the word at this time of year; scraping by doesn't fully do justice to the state of my financial well-being during the first months of the year). The train I elected to board for my trip home, as one might expect at 4:00 in the afternoon, was fairly crowded, with several passengers being required to stand and utilize the steel handrails while riding. I was lucky enough to board at the Lake station, by which point enough passengers had disembarked that I was able to procure a seat in the crowded car. This is especially useful to me, as I enjoy reading while traveling; I get most of my reading for pleasure done during my utilization of public transit. My particular experience on this run of the Red Line was uneventful for the first leg of my run (Lake to Grand/State), which allowed me to catch up in my book of choice. (Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live, in case you were wondering, although I don't believe that particular detail is necessary to the moral of the story. I just like sharing a good book title when I'm reading it. Then again, after relating what transpired this afternoon, I get the feeling that you don't read much.)

You boarded the train at Grand/State. I barely noticed the location of the stop, with your appearance bringing me out of my private world enough to notice where in Chicago we were at the time. To be honest, I often get so enraptured in my own bubble of reading pleasure when I ride public transit, I have a tendency to miss my stop and continue on down the line, forcing myself to disembark several blocks away from my final destination. (If I were tweeting every inane detail of my life, this would have to be hash-tagged '#firstworldproblems'. Fortunately, this is not Twitter.) What did happen was that you managed to puncture my focus and solitude, as well as the relative tranquility of every other passenger in the car, when you chose to declare at maximum volume the following phrase:

"GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME."

Riding the Red Line leads me to experience a great many scenarios that the average reader of this blog might never get to see in their everyday life. The communal nature of the Red Line, as well as the relative economic cost of public transit in Chicago, ensures that a certain air of eccentricity is maintained in the train cars. For example, the other day, I was riding along when the train stopped at Chicago/State to allow passengers to board/disembark. While stopped, a man (who I can only believe is homeless, though the relative cleanliness of his shoes and well-shaven face gives me pause when making such a declaration) stood up from his seat in the middle of the car, walked to the open doors, and flung a bag of empty cans onto the boarding platform before returning to his seat. When the train remained stopped for 'technical difficulties', he repeated the action with a bag filled with paper garbage. Having now thrown two bags of refuse from the car, he smartly saluted his created monument to disposable waste before returning to his seat. I should point out that nobody said anything to the man regarding his discarded luggage, nor did anyone even raise an eyebrow at his peculiar actions. (Apart from one girl sitting across from me, who shared a look with me that could only read "What the heck have we gotten ourselves into?" I answered back with a shrug, which produced a giggle from her before we both returned to our reading of choice, mine being the aforementioned title and hers being George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords. There is a small part of me that remains convinced that this was the love of my life, whom I shall never again encounter. I could write stories about how many people in Chicago I know bemoan their lost "CTA crushes".)

I bring up this story in order to point out that users of the CTA are a hard crowd to rattle, no matter how extreme the actions of its occupants.

Which makes the following story all the more interesting, from where I was sitting.

As I mentioned before, your declarative statement snapped me from the private reverie of my reading material, gathering the attentions of every other rider in the car. The particular tone of voice that you used (with such wonderful projection! my actor's heart says) is one that your average Chicago citizen would associate with sexual assault, attempted theft, or being set on fire. As we (I'm including the other passengers in my car in this usage of the possessive pronoun "we" from hereon in) looked in your general direction with alarm and concern for your well-being, we were treated to watch you storm your way from one end of the train to the other, taking a seat at the far end of the car. From your state of dress, it was possible to discern the following: a) you are not homeless; b) you are a white, middle-age woman with long blonde hair and the wherewithal to have acquired a white fur coat; c) you were either dressed for casual shopping downtown or for a light luncheon in the city (I'm inclined toward the former due to your holding a shopping bag from Macy's); and d) you were not intoxicated, though that again could be a misjudgment on my part.

As you took your seat at the end of the car, you glared back towards your original boarding spot with a look of pure vitriol in your eyes, the kind of look reserved for someone who has made a highly inappropriate pass at you in a crowded bar. While still spitting venom from your eyes towards the opposite end of the car, you made the second of five statements I overheard from you in the train car this afternoon, with this one being delivered with a volume equal to (or slightly less than) your first statement:

"Fucking foreigners."

At this point, every eye in the car, which until then had been trained on you, shot back towards the open car door to observe the offending party in your domestic encounter. I expected to see a large and imposing male, or perhaps a group of mischievous teenagers (of which there are many on the Red Line). Instead, what I observed were two girls of Asian descent, staring in your general direction with a mixture of hurt, confusion, and (mostly) intense disbelief at what had just transpired.

The train departed from the station, moving into the tunnel. What happened next was what struck me so profoundly; every eye in the car, including and especially those of us who had until this point been reading and keeping quietly to ourselves, was drawn back to you. Granted, this might have been out of a fear that you would suddenly burst into flames, pull out an Uzi, and scream bloody murder as you defended your fervent nationalist pride. Given the looks of loathing and disgust for you and your state of being that many of us seemed to share, I highly doubt this. What I know is that two white patrons of the CTA apparently struck up a conversation with you. I cannot say that I heard what they were saying, or that I heard every word of your next two phrases, but from the nature of your statements and the events that transpired afterwards, I can only imagine that their inquiries consisted of something in the nature of "What the fuck is your problem, lady?" Your responses that I was able to overhear are printed as follows:

"What, I need to see a psychiatrist?"

"I'm not a pedophile!"

(In the grand scheme of things, Statement #4 might be irrelevant to the entirety of the scenario, but it is my journalistic intent to portray the happenings of this afternoon as accurately as I am able to report them.)

By this point, the focus of every rider in the car was locked on you. You stood up and swayed in the back door of the car, holding onto the rails for support as you turned your head away from making eye contact with anyone else in the train. You remained this way until the train reached its next destination, the Chicago/State stop. Again, this is one entire stretch of track where the eyes of every rider in the car were on you. The sheer probability of this ever happening on public transit is typically reserved for instances involving fire, murder, or one of those crazy flash mobs that I hear about happening from time to time. When the doors opened ("on the right") at Chicago/State, you left from your precarious perch in the safety door and walked towards the nearest exit. As you did this, you uttered the last of your statements for the benefit of the entire car to hear, which I now reprint with 100% accuracy:

"Oh, sorry, I didn't know I should be afraid of free speech!"

You then disembarked, walking towards the nearest staircase to reach the street. As I covered before, it is unlikely that our paths will ever cross again, and as far as I'm concerned, good riddance.

The 'offending parties' remained standing, exchanging a confused snapshot of conversation with a seated patron, probably somewhere along the lines of "what the hell just happened?". They did nothing to suggest any malevolence, and I'm pretty sure that at no point in their afternoon did they bear any ill will to you or to your person. There IS A CHANCE that you were referencing someone behind them, although I doubt this because they were the only ones who seemed to make any eye contact with you prior to your outburst, as well as the fact that the train car behind them was empty. (2 + 2 = Racism?)

The moral to my story is that this transpired on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

You may have had cause to say the things that you said. You may have a history that led you to shout with such hatred the things that you shouted. I don't feel like there's anything that anyone could have done to you short of physical assault that would warrant such an outburst, however, and I find it exceedingly unlikely that those girls in any way deserved the vile hatred you spewed. What I can say is that, for once, I am glad that you were able to perceive the general mood of your surroundings. I am glad that everyone on the train, regardless of background, recognized what you did and reacted with displeasure. Not violence, or a countering epithet that would have led to verbal warfare, but rather a silent protest against your actions regarding fellow patrons of the CTA.

You are right when you suggest that you should not be afraid of "free speech." You had every right to say what you did. However, you must also remember that we (the other people on the train with you, including those "foreigners" you seemed to loathe so much) have an equal right to freedom of speech, and to respond to your statements with thoughts and words of our own. That's an American value, but even more so, it is a universal value. Dr. King pointed that out several times in his life. (or at least, I think he did. If you can prove otherwise, please let me know: travis.cook.j@gmail.com)

It's good that you recognized our disapproval of your actions, and it's especially wonderful that this disapproval was a universal feeling. I'm proud to have been in a place where such a counter to prejudice could take place. In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively small and inconsequential matter, but for one afternoon, a crowd full of strangers were able to unite against hate without resorting to angry words, violent action, or forcing a confrontation where one would possibly be warranted. (Those two patrons who tried to talk to you non-withstanding.) What you felt wasn't an outcry against what you said; it was a judgment on what you did and what it represents, which is purely blind bigotry. It was made in the eyes of your fellow man, and carried out with a subtle shift of the atmosphere of the train car that required no mass demonstration and resulting in nothing more than you feeling as though you had to leave the train car. It wasn't your speech being threatened; it was your worldview, which came crashing down around you like a broken glass house, shattered by the stones that you cast.

We've come a long way over the years in terms of how we relate to one another, and there is surely much work to be done. This was especially proven to me by the fact that your actions seemed to be of second-nature to you. However, as an aesthetic background to the daily actions of the Red Line (and to modern American society), you were decidedly out of line.

You shouldn't be afraid of freedom of speech. But you also need to realize that we are not afraid of it, either.

Yours truly,

Travis J. Cook, fellow patron of the CTA

P.S. Next time, take a cab.

P.P.S. Although you should know that cabs are usually driven by minorities in this city. Wouldn't want you to be trapped in a small car with someone you actively despise. I bet your driver would have a lot more to say about the subject at hand.

The Erstwhile Resolutions: Goals for 2013

I'll be honest: 2012 was a little bit up and down for me. It was probably the most eventful year of my life, and alternately filled with joy and downright depression. I'm glad for the experience, and there are moments which will resonate long into the years to come.

With that being said, there are a few things that I would like to have happen this year:

(This may sound slightly (OK, very) callow, shallow, and downright disrespectful, but believe me when I say that this first request comes from a very deep and personal place: could everybody in my life please not die this year? I've been to a lot of funerals in the past two years, and could really stand to keep all of you around for the foreseeable future, so let's stick to that, deal? Deal.)

(Sidenote #1: These are not so much resolutions as goals for the year. Resolutions are made to be broken. Goals are things that I can look back on and say that I achieved or didn't achieve. Think of it as a checklist for success.)

• Write Book Two of the Atlantean Chronicles. (I started it today! 30 pages in! And judging by the outline, this is the book where shit gets real. Not that it didn't get real in the last book, but shit gets hella real in this book. Get excited.)
• Get more stories written.
• Get one (1) story published. (Sent out several, and received several rejection letters. The name of the game is persistence.)
• Acquire an agent/get a book contract for Book One of the Atlantean Chronicles. (I mean, I've got a book just sitting around, and it doesn't suck, so let's see if anybody wants it, you know?)
• Direct a show. (This is going to happen, so the sub-goal is "Direct a show that does not suck." This seems highly attainable.)
• Get cast in a show somehow/somewhere. (I guess I really should audition more, as this fell by the wayside for one reason or another. Maybe it's because I've found that I enjoy directing/writing/music more than constantly being rejected for one reason or another.)
• Write a full length play. (Also attainable.)
• Write ten new songs. (I wrote one in an hour and a half last year, and have the ideas for at least eight, so this could be done by February. More on this in weeks to come.)
• Play 5 new open mics. (One down, five to go!)
• Explore new employment opportunities. (Not that I'm not satisfied with McCormick's, but I'd like to continue to try and find new means for gainful employment. Let's see how this goes.)
• Read 200 Books (New/Never read before. Honestly, we're already one down: Satch, Dizzy, & Rapid Robert by Timothy M. Gay. Good read!)
• Get into grad school.
• SUB GOAL: Get fully funded for said graduate schooling experience. 

 In order to accomplish these goals, I have determined some personal goals that go beyond mere accomplishments, although as far as I'm concerned, they're all accomplishments of their own. They are as follows:

• Avoid surgery. (Seriously, no more surgery. My (phantom) wisdom teeth still ache.)
• Start a savings account. (Mine got blown through between moving to Chicago and my travails out west. Time to start over again.)
• Continue to keep my credit in check. (Of all the goals, this one is actually the easiest. I'm just paranoid like that.)
• Lose weight. (A perennial goal, although I'm doing well so far.)
• Set a sleeping schedule. (Not having windows in my room has NOT been good for this, although I've worked over the holiday break to get back to getting up at a reasonable hour. Hopefully, this one will continue.)

And that's my plan for 2013. I don't need to accomplish all of the goals listed above. (Doing that would be somewhat impossible/might kill me.) However, if I can get even 2/3 of that list completed, I'll be happy as a clam by this time next year.

Happy New Year, everybody!