And Now for Something Completely Different: 9-12

There's a house on my block which has a porch that overlooks a four way stop sign, as well as several bus stops. Sound familiar? It should. It's my house.

On that porch one will frequently see a man who has a reputation far different "in the real world" from the reputation in the online world. Online? Let's just say that I may not be god-like in my powers and abilities, but I am on close speaking terms with a sizable percentage of those people who are.

If you saw that latest Bruce Willis "Die Hard" movie, you saw the fictional antics of some "black-hat hackers" as they launched a "fire sale" ("everything must go") attack bringing modern technical civilization to its knees as part of a national-scale blackmail and robbery scheme. I'm not the sort of person who would launch a "fire sale"... I'm the sort of person who has a patented invention that could stand in the way of one. Oddly enough, nobody wants to buy the product, and I can barely give it away on free DVDs with full instructions included. In the online world, I make total sense to people who know WTF I am talking about. The other folks who work tirelessly to forestall a "fire sale" have their own means and methods not too much different from mine. They just play their cards closer to the vest, so to speak, and patents are a very transparent and revealing weak spot in the minds of lots of security implimentation staff. Yet for getting the patent, and continuing development far past the patented product, I get the same kind of respect anyone gets when they are manning the outposts far afield and watching for the coming dangers. For danger will be coming, something big, and coming from unknown directions, and in unknown means.

"In the real world", most of the people driving by see someone who is undergroomed, underdressed, evidently has nothing to do other than sit on the porch when the weather's warm, watching the cars go by.

I also watch the bus go by. It's the Ride-On 48 route bus, and I wish to almighty g_d that it didn't run by here. It is of no use at all to me. I do not use public transportation if there's any way to avoid it.

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Due to a combination of family medical crisis -- my father needed someone to watch over him for a few months after major vascular surgery, in New Mexico, where I was born, and where he retired -- and a bit of wanderlust, I spent a few years Out West, in Farmington NM, Denver CO, Austin TX, Takoma WA, and Daytona FL. Eventually, I "went bust" and wound up returning home with little more than my Stratocaster, my clothes, and my sad old 386sx computer with its harddrive full of the newly-available free operating system, Linux, which had just been released and was "bleeding edge" in terms of novelty and speed of development version releases.

I got home to the family house pretty much dead broke but with a small reliable annuity income, and for the first time in about 20 years, without a car.

At first, I was incredibly happy to have a bus-stop in my front yard, but before long, things changed. The ridership of the bus had been, back in the late 1980s when it was a Metrobus line, mostly mid-level executives headed to their Federal jobs downtown. In 1996, the Ride-On bus ridership was mostly very poor folks, mostly black but increasingly "latino". I, myself, was pretty much "gothic" or what some folks would have called a "death-rocker". Yet one day my rather bad ear for Espa~ol picked up the phrase "es loco, pensas es el Count Dracula. Muy pelligroso." This was rather odd. The person addressed asked "Que es 'count'?" and the first responded "es como un grandee." And every day thereafter, the subtle yet painful violence escalated. And with the fine civic devotion of illegal aliens to making sure that everyone got their shot in, the rumor spread beyond the bus into the local stores and beyond. I could not shop anyplace within walking distance, and riding the bus was pure hell. I went noplace I did not have to go, cut my purchases to the bare bones, and four months later and 40 pounds lighter, nearly a skeleton wearing rags and tatters, with toes poking out of my sneakers in the winter, I bought a used car and have ridden that goddamn bus maybe 10 times since 1997.

And most of the people who were making my life a hell on earth everytime I rode the bus, they're still riding it, and still make sure to add a little misery to my life anytime I ride. After all, I'm white and it's their bus, the goddamned racist filth's bus.

So, now I make it a point to have not one, but two, cars in legal condition and working order.

And as I sit on the porch in nice weather, I watch who boards, and who gets off.

And with two exceptions, for the last decade, I have seen not one "anglo" under the age of 50 or so get on or off that bus. Or maybe I see them board or debark exactly once.

You see, I am convinced by my own experiences and the fact that no other "whites" ride it, that every last non-black/non-latino under the age of 50 who rides that bus suffers the exact same open hostility I did. "Drive out the whites" seems to be the popular sentiment in the bus-riding crowd, at least on the Route 48 Ride-On.

So who are the exceptions?

Two "anglo" females, blondes. Nobody's going to try to drive them off of the bus. Besides, one of those is still a child.

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I don't want anyone to get the idea that I think that all of the spanish-speaking ridership on the Route 48 bus -- or any public transportation, for that matter -- are American-Hating Foreign Racists. Of course, I could be wrong, and perhaps all of them are such. But it only takes a minimum of one on every last bus trip I ever took on the "48" to keep me from riding that bus. That means that if I want a job, it's going to be one to which I drive a car. And the sort of foreign racists that chant their mantra "por la raza, todo, por los otros, niente" all understand that if a job remains open because I am afraid to ride the bus, that's a job that remains available to them, because "no American wants that work". Actually, we want the work. We just don't want to be reduced to crippled wreckage, a tiny bit at a time, every time we take public transportation.

And to think, there are people campaigning for public office who want to turn all of Montgomery County into a giant human beehive, where you can't get anywhere without riding the goddamned bus.

I wonder what language they'll speak in that giant beehive.

Por me, es ahora no trabajo para yo no soy latino, y para yo no hablo espa~ol.

And I won't ride public transportation, either. It isn't just unsafe. It's actively hostile.

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Day after day, for years at a time -- remember, I have a small annuity that allows me to buy inexpensive clothing and feed myself and save up for the inevitable repairs on old cars, and to pay my own bills such as I use at this mortgage-free fully-owned home -- I have watched the people getting on and off the bus, and as my somewhat slow-on-the-uptake neighbor has observed, "the neighborhood has changed".

It is in fact quite different from when I grew up here. It used to be a pretty nice neighborhood, but now I live in the g_d damned ghetto.

South of Aspen Hill Road, it is Ghetto As Fuck. I know a 'Nam Vet biker type from inner-city Baltimore who calls Aspen Hill south of Aspen Hill Road "goddamn sketchy, getting pretty rough down there" and since he doesn't live here, I can say with firm conviction that he doesn't know the half of it.

A lot of places are getting like that.

Maybe that's why people are starting to get a little bit upset. A LOT of people.

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Now please don't misunderstand me, as much as you might prefer that.

I like President Obama. I think he's a genuinely great man, at least he has done absolutely admirably since taking office, considering the plate he was handed, so to speak.

However, when I see a bus driving by my house every half hour, and I know that I am being taxed -- heavily -- by Montgomery County so that this bus will go by my house, mostly full of American Hating Foreign Racists who will attack me (however subtly, it still hurts) if I try to ride it to a job... I think I'm being taxed quite enough so that hate filled foreigners can prevent me from getting any job that requires public-transportation commuting.

Add to that the taxes for the economic collapse which everyone knows was caused mostly by greedy mortgage originators selling overpriced mortgages on inflated-value homes to unqualified illegal aliens, taxes that my grandkids would be paying if I had children or grandchildren?

Now you want to tax me more so that American Hating Foreign Racists that Kept Me From Working and Crashed Our Economy can get free comprehensive Healthcare? And you want to reduce my own access to healthcare to give it to them?

Fuck That.