Helpless Passengers of Automated Progress
Why be moral if civilization is inherently good?
It’s odd that we forget so much from our formative years, although those gaps in our memory likely sustain the illusion that we’re self-made. But one incident that made an impression on me happened on a winter’s day in Toronto in the early 1990s. I regularly took the public bus to high school. I recall when I used to take the bus how easy it was to doze off just from the bus’s gentle rocking motions. The bus was like the passengers’ mother and the passengers still had an infant’s sense of safety when we were rocked that way.
Typically the bus driver didn’t speed, but on this occasion the driver manhandled the wheel and the gas pedal like an escaped convict. I was standing near the side door along with several other passengers, holding metal handles for stability, since all the seats had been taken. The bus jerked wildly as the driver sped and repeatedly slammed the breaks and accelerated like he was racing to a finish line.
One of the others standing near me was a thin middle-aged man originally from India or perhaps Pakistan, as I recall. Due to the bus’s inexplicable herky-jerky dashes, that man lost his grip on the handle, landed on the slush-covered floor and rolled into the hollow where the few stairs are that lead down to the bus’s side…
