NYC Transit Strike Over (Bloomberg "Liberals" Rejoice)!

So what? I had a few days of minor inconvenience--the first day of the strike I couldn't make it to work, and the other two days I had to leave my apartment in Queens by 6:30 and walk in the cold to the nearest Long Island Railroad station, about a mile away. Sure, it was REALLY cold, but I saw, again, what my fellow New Yorkers do best--get together in a crisis. Since 9/11, there has been a tremendous sense of community here, and while waiting on line for LIRR tickets, and being packed like sardines in the special PATH train to the Word Trade Center station from 33rd Street (through New Jersey!), no-one got angry, and everyone was talking to each other and generally in good spirits.

Even for all of the inconvenience, my fellow New Yorkers and I strongly supported the union (52%-40%, according to one poll), though you couldn't really tell it by the news coverage.

But what was a little disturbing to me were some of the subtle signs of racism I heard in the discourse, especially from (purported) white, college-educated liberals (I am one), including Mike Bloomberg, our Republican mayor (a Democrat until right before he ran), who called the actions of the union "thuggish." (The membership is largely black and Hispanic.) Or the reaction of a social worker in my Alzheimer's support group (another white, professional, upper-middle class New Yorker who thought that her college and graduate school education made her better than any other kind of worker)--she couldn't get over the fact that these "dumb" workers had the gall to be paid more than she. "Have you seen them?' she said, "they are Pygmies!!"

My friend at Re: Maines says it better than I can here.

And so does Steve Gilliard here.