Dear Reader,
Please do not forget to read the after-thought below (written two years later).....
Last week Der Standard had a short article about the Wiener Linien, the public transport company,
doing a survey about eating in the metro.
As far as I can tell--with my mediocre German and not reading carefully--the little article
ended with reflections about how the pace of modern life, regrettably, forces us to eat fast food.
I posed the question to several middle-aged employees of an insurance company...
and they unanimously spoke in favor of banning food in the U-bahn.
The arguments?
One person said the food stank...
After another had said that people eat DURUM--a kind of "Turkish" food...
Another said the food was so greasy that you couldn't avoid making a mess....
Most interestingly, the gentleman who spoke out at length on the difficulty of eating
such food without making a mess does not ride the metro.
I wonder if he has ever eaten Durum?
I dared not say what I was thinking, and it was only later that I formulated a reaction...
These smug middle class people have no capacity to imagine someone else's life....
If people eat in the metro in the morning while they are on the way to work, I doubt
whether that is their preference.
I've even done it myself, and I would prefer a more leisurely life style.
In fact I ride the U-bahn regularly, and I've never gotten my clothes dirty because I sat
down on a seat spoiled with greasy food.
The claim--you have to make a mess if you eat such food--was apparently totally
a priori... and largely motivated by the excessive fastidiousness of the speaker...
Don't let them make my clothes dirty!
No mention of freedom of choice in the discussion...
No one spoke about the value of living in a society where there was freedom from interference
in one's personal life.....
all in all, a sad conversation, the sort of thing that makes me want to find another way to earn a living....
Re-reading this entry after two years....
i think I was a little hard on my students in what I've written.
At any rate, I am embarrassed by the thought that one of them could read this.
I do think that in this entry I make a fair point, but I also am bothered by the fact that they were basically pleasant people who were kind to me. My working conditions at the time were not good, but my students knew nothing of that...
However, what's hard is when you have the feeling that by saying what you really think,
no matter how diplomatically, you risk the chance of getting fired.
but, wait! back up! "no matter how diplomatically?" Here's the problem: a real conversation can't be filled with hedges and qualifications and beating around the bush....Or, perhaps some people live like that, but I can't regard it as ideal. Perhaps I could have been honest with my students, or more honest in general. Right now I can't say for sure, but, perhaps I should have said what I was thinking at the time....
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