So I went on a plane for the first time in about five years, flying makes me quite ill, don’t you know, so not being in funds right now, I couldn’t rent a private plane, and had to use the San Antonio airport. I was astonied, to wax biblical, to see people having their shoes shined. My emotions were no less roiled, than, while piloting my exorbitantly priced rental vehicle on the thoroughfares of Miami I began ruminating on the the concept of for-pay fast travel lanes. Like any good conservationist, the concept of the carpool lane leaves me warm and fuzzy inside, just like a sip of a mulled wine. But like any good humanist, the for-pay fast travel lane leaves me cold, like clasping Joe Paterno’s no doubt clammy hand. My shame and consternation is occasioned by the fact that I just realized, that I should have been horrified the first time I ever encountered a pay-to-travel-faster-road. A speedy commute should not be a luxury reserved for the holders of ‘ez passes’ or whatever shibbolethic token they use to separate the indigent from the wealthy. For, in Miami, in some of the fast lanes, you cannot simply throw some coins into a repository. No, you have to have a travel card of some sort. So you have to sign up for that card, and have a banking account or possibly a credit card. Because of course, the banking mob’s palm must be greased. So the tourist that is rushing to the airport, or the mother late to pick up her worried child, the philanderer late for a tryst, the out -of-stater from Texas, none of them have access to the fast lanes, that are ostensibly upkept using taxpayer dollars. But where or not they are private enterprise roads or are supported with taxpayers dollars is not central to the argument at hand. The issue is that we have been so enculturated to the ubiquity of the privatized commons, that we bat no eyelid at the commercialized road. Or the privately owned jail, or the privately- owned public Zuccotti park (what does that even mean), or …need I go on? Apparently a long time ago, they took class warfare onto our roads. Thankfully, we have finally taken it to the streets.
