Stupid.

When I was a young boy, my dad worked full time at an executive position in the food industry, and part-time, wearing a long white coat ('t was the fashion of the times, still observed today) on the floor of a grocery store, on Thursday and Friday evenings, and on Saturday.

The grocery store was some distance from where we lived, a distance that - because we had no car during the war years - was covered using public transportation, specifically two different streetcar lines, a subway line, and a bus line each way. I'm not sure how long a trip it was, but I'd be surprised if it was less than an hour and a half, maybe more.

Oh, and did I mention that he also brought home most of the family's groceries on one of those trips?

Yeah, that too. And he was just another white guy.

He's been dead a long time now, but I suspect that he would have been amused by this story in today's Boston Globe.

Wide racial gap exists on speed of Boston-area commutes

Disparity particularly bad on buses, averaging 80 minutes more per week

Let's see.

80 minutes more, on commutes back-and-forth, so 40 minutes each way, say five days a week, so eight minutes more per commuting experience.

Oh, the humanity.

The racism.

It takes my breath away. Makes me throw up a little, in my mouth, if you get my drift.

And leaves me - I, too, am wholly dependent on public transportation these days, my Mercedes days behind me - ashamed.

Ashamed of what? Ashamed of whom?

Read the story in the newspaper online.

And you do the math.

Update:

The race still goes to the swift, it seems. It's just that it's hard to do swift on public transportation:

Note that the disparity basically disappears for those commuting by car. Obviously, mass transit is just the new Jim Crow!

Get the minorities a Volt!

Everybody (theoretically, at least) wins!

Government Motors sells out its stock of Volts, and has a captive customer to buy its turkey of an automobile. Cranberry sauce optional.

The darkies - uh, people of color; African-Americans who, along with their ancestors, may never have been within haling distance of Africa - get a car in the driveway, another part of the American dream realized, with or without employment, any purchase price (there will inevitably be give-aways) heavily subsidized.

What could possibly go wrong?

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